Everyday your organisation uses design as an essential tool for communicating and presenting ideas and information. For the past hundred years this has been predominantly through printed media and although new mediums such as television have captivated audiences, their design requirements have remained relatively unchanged.

Celebrated this year for it’s 20th birthday, the World Wide Web has changed the way businesses and consumers interact. It is within this digital space that we find the rules of print design turned on their head.

Digital media has become an important component in the marketing mix, a way to communicate, engage and interact with consumers and for some businesses their only place of trade. This makes it increasingly important that designers and their organisations understand the medium in which they are working and appropriately design and develop campaigns that will work.

Design control

Historically we have defined good design as solutions that also tell good stories, for it is through narrative that we engage consumers to relate with our brand. In this context, control of the narrative becomes the most important tool; we can choose precisely how people will interact with our design. A measure of this control is lost in the digital space.

During the past 20 years as organisations move toward the digital space an expectation has grown for these traditional print designers to develop increasingly complex online experiences. While it is nice to think we can reutilise the same staff to deliver on more work, the sad truth is that these staff require retraining or at least time to properly understand the medium in which they are working.

Historically, a majority of print designers have flocked toward Adobe Flash, because it is the closest approximation of print design work. This is very much a reflexive approach based on not understanding the medium in which they are working.  Unfortunately this also leads to an assumption that authorial control can be exerted online, which simply isn’t true.

Khoi Vinh, Design Director of the New York Times once said “Looking for opportunities to execute the sort of improvisational and dramatic creative visions that we see in printed periodicals, for instance, is likely to become an exercise in disappointment.” The truth is that the web really wasn’t designed, and isn’t effective, for highly displaying highly effective visual skills.

In order to correctly design for the web you must first understand the medium, its nuances and restrictions.

User control

Browser innovation and open standards have meant that the web is available to all instead of being tied to a specific vendor or proprietary standards. This has led to users having choice, actually a lot of choices. Users can choose which web browser and which operating system they want to use on their computer. They may also choose to browse the web without JavaScript and cookies enabled, or perhaps with images and styles turned off. Perhaps the users will opt to receive breaking news via RSS or email notifications. The most important thing to recognise is that users in the end have choice and that previous attempts to lock users to proprietary applications or standards have in the end failed. This should have a big influence on how you choose to approach design for the web.

Within the web, content is separate from design. We can publish and repurpose content multiple times, each with a different style applied. Designers initially see this as a loss of control; it is no longer possible to exert control over interaction with their design. This is in part true, but not the end of the world, as most people would have you believe.

If users have so much control over how they now choose to consume content this means for designers they now have a multiplicity of states to design for. Content may appear different, depending on where it is published or on which device it is accessed, so designers need to cater for each of those possibilities. In doing so they also need to consider accessibility requirements while still tying in narrative and behavioural approaches to user-centred design to ensure they capture the desired attention.

Behaviour

If control were the most important tool for building narratives in the print world, then behaviour would be it’s equivalent in the digital world. While designers feel they have lost control over vital aspects of their domain, in actual fact designing for this content just requires more discipline.

Designing for behaviours becomes an extension of what most designers would term user-centred design. Rather than simply focusing on a user experience, it is necessary to look at ways in which we can influence and shape behaviours and interactions of our consumers to trend them toward preferred organisational preferences. From the outset this sounds evil, most notions of control and influence do, but it is in no way different from any other narrative or approach taken in other mediums.

In a medium where traditional control is lacking, then you need to understand user behaviour to best guide and influence user interaction with your content. Designers now more than ever need to understand their audiences and shape their approaches to guide the user interactions their organisations seek.

Give up control to get it back

It is not surprising on the web then, that you need to change your approach. Your organisation can turn a loss of visual control into a beneficial interaction with your consumers.

The first step is acknowledging that in digital media the rules are different; the medium is different. Once you accept this you can start to formulate a new approach and develop strategies to better engage and interact with consumers on their terms. This will eventually lead to less control over how your message is viewed, but not less control over the message itself.

Understand the constraints of the medium, embrace them as benefits of the medium and continue to develop immersive interactions that engage and generate attention.

Experiment to success

After 20 years of the World Wide Web the truth is that we still don’t have the answers. The rate of innovation and change within this space coupled with organisations unwillingness to accept change has left us in a mess.

There are a lot of successful organisations using the web to their advantage, but a vast majority of the most successful cases are from those who chose to throw away the print rulebook. For these organisations they truly embrace the web for what it is, rather than trying to treat is as print in disguise.

To achieve success online, experiment, give up control and design immersive interactions that captivate your consumers in a way you do with narratives in the print world.

I originally wrote this article and it was published in AdAsia during late 2009. I have republished it on my blog for a wider audience.

I was honoured to be invited to speak at the Asian Publishing Convention again this year. Held in Ho Chi Minh City during 8-9 July and with over 200 delegates from more than 19 countries it was a superb opportunity to network with publishing professionals.

I think a key takeaway from the the event is better understanding of how market pressures are forcing change within the publishing industry and what types of steps these media owners will have to take to remain relevant and engaging in an increasingly digital landscape. 

I presented 3 topics during the conference:

• Measuring online activities: what and how
• How technology platforms are changing newspaper and magazine publishing
• How to choose and improve your content management system

As with media owners across the world, Asia is finding it hard to adapt from a traditional single medium newsroom to a newsroom that encompasses all the latest digital technology. Unfortunately in not adopting early they risk alienating themselves and forcing their subscribers to look elsewhere for content, this leads to a loss in loyalty, something that is very difficult to regain.

Daniel Dilger wrote a brilliant post on why Flash for the iPad and iPhone are simply not viable, ignoring hardware, battery and other constraints – it simply isn’t possible from a gesture perspective.

Hooray, finally someone is talking sense.

Read the post here

As the title indicates this post is specifically targeted at the ongoing discussions that swept twitter yesterday regarding whether or not designers should have a hand in coding their designs.

Initially this was started by Elliot Jay Stocks who tweeted:

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No execuse.

Since I spend a lot of time working closely with designers I thought it would be interesting to weigh in on some of the points which have been floating around.

Should designers be able to code their own designs? Yes, no, maybe… I mean actually it has less to do with code and more to do with understanding the medium. In all the time I have worked with designers, the one thing I have found refreshing is to work with designers who actually understand the medium in which they are working. Unlike print, which is a very controlled medium, moving into the web is very much a different experience for designers. Without properly understanding the medium in which they work you are destined for hard to implement designs which do not make use of benefits of the web.

In order to make things pretty on the web designers need to first understand principally what is possible, how their design will work, that what they are designing can actually be implemented without too many browser limitations and that it will look as good on the web as it did in Illustrator when they were making it.

I am not advocating that designers should go out and learn HTML, CSS and Javascript and do it all themselves, unless of course you are a sole-trader, but in understand the medium you will in turn work quicker, smarter and produce designs that are easy to implement, manage and maintain over longer periods.

For those who have come from print backgrounds, this is what you already know, it’s what you have done in print for years. You first learnt the medium, its constraints and how to deal with them. Now you need to learn the new medium you find yourself working in.

Last.fm is a great service, even since acquisition, and the streaming capability through their own applications has played for hours both within the Quiqcorp offices and through my laptop whilst travelling.

SweetFM, a new application from choko moko bridges the gap between Last.fm and iTunes. Described as “Last.fm + Awesomeness” the author is not far wrong with his claim.

Not only does SweetFM stream Last.fm stations, but it also supports shuffling tags. Simply define a number of station tags you wish to hear and let the app take care of the details.

While there are a number of features such as impressive album art from Amazon.com, growl support and customised styles there are two features which make this app an absolute gem.

• Stream pausing: Really like the song you are listening to when the phone rings? No worries, hit the pause button and resume the stream when you come back.
• Export to iTunes: Yes it’s true, you can directly export streamed songs to your iTunes library for local storage. SweetFM can automatically export your loved, playlist or all tracks. This certainly isn’t legal in every country, but it is very slick. And in case you were wondering, even on poor connections with continued buffering the resulting iTunes stored copy is identical to the original stream.

Do yourself a favour, go and download a trial.

There is no denying Twitter is experiencing explosive growth. With this growth and the approach of mainstream adoption comes big changes to the way Twitter has been used to date. The streams are starting to become overwhelming, the more and more people you follow, their increase numbers of tweets has become an information glut.

Richard Dale of Sigma Partners has an interesting take on Twitter as a Universal Information Stream, a stream location for publishing any type of information.

The above approach has pros and cons but I do believe it is essentially what is and will happen to Twitter. For those of us that have been using Twitter for some time we are used to just following and communicating in our small groups, a few hundred or thousand followers is fine and if people start tweeting random crap you simply unfollow them. If Twitter reaches mainstream adoption and other technology providers start to tweet then the signal to noise ratio is going to become almost entirely noise.

This means the way in which we currently interact with Twitter will no longer work. Choosing to follow people and users may not be the best way to digest information anymore, there is simply too many users, too many streams and too much information to digest at any one time.

The best way to think of this is like TV. Whilst your TV is capable of tuning into the air waves and receiving signals for hundreds of TV stations, you can’t watch hundreds of them on your screen at once. It isn’t technically impossible to achieve, and many TVs allow at least picture-in-picture, but the reason you don’t get more than two channels is you simply can’t digest anymore information at a single time. The same is true of Twitter, there is already too much information and it will only increase over time.

As Twitter continues to grow and it’s usage profile continues to adjust, we as users and developers will have to adjust with it. New tools and new methods for separating the signal from the noise will need to be developed. To think of it like a TV again, we need a way to tune into specific channels that interest us, while ignoring all that other white noise we don’t want.

Those who innovate and develop tools that allow us to search and view subsets of the Twitter information stream that focus on specific topics and channels will lead the next generation of Twitter tools. Search and discovery tools will redefine the way we work with Twitter.

Despite the gloomy outlook for many industries and the large number of development projects being put on hold, it is encouraging to see a continued growth in the media industry, at least throughout some areas of the world.

Christopher Chia, the CEO of the Singapore Media Development Authority:

“It is said that sometimes it is actually anti-cyclical. If the economy generally goes down, the media sector actually comes up and one reason we found behind this is that it (the media) allows people to be actually entertained at a cost much lower than, say, to travel somewhere else. So it does allow a lot of consumption to actually happen.”

I agree with the above statement and think that it’s something that requires repeating and continued assertion to media clients worldwide. Now is not a time to cut back on spending, pull programs or put digital media developments on hold. In fact, now is the best time to ramp up your digital media investments.

Media companies have immense opportunites to gain market share, with an increased consumer consumption and participation in their digital media developments.

In Singapore, the Media Development Authority is spending S$250 million to create and support over 2,000 jobs in the local media industry this year. This is great news and they expect to create more than 10,000 new jobs in the industry over the coming 6 years.

I have spoken with a number of media organisations throughout the start of the year, and especially in Asia there seems to be a genuine interest in digital media investment, but convincing management and shareholders that this investment will pay dividends is still not an easy sell in some organisations.

For those managers, consultants, developers and staff involved in these discussions the most important issue moving forward is education. Educating both internal and external stakeholders as to the value of investment in digital media and the appropriateness of its timing is purely an educational hurdle, everyone has a job in the sales process and its a sales process that should have been happening for some time.

I am very interested to hear of any other countries and organisations that are looking to support and invest in digital media training and job creation throughout 2009.