Traditionally, such a sign would probably read something like “shopping carts here”, “please find carts here” or perhaps simply “shopping carts”. Or no text at all, but a symbol, like a traffic sign. Ikea, perceived as a company selling simple yet stylish design at affordable prices, has chosen to use conversational language in its communication, incl. store signage, instead of the authoritative, rather impersonal language typically used in traffic signs, public as well as commercial spaces (think of “no smoking” and “please wait behind this line” instead of something like “you can put that cigarette away here” and “hold on tight, we’ll be right with you”).

Online, I remember Feedburner has always featured quite clever, “chatty” language throughout the experience on its site (nowadays under Google). “Burn a feed right this instant” and “Sometimes your feed just wants to look good. Spruce it up in the following ways:”  for instance. Or Firefox after it crashes and can’t recover the tabs you had open before the crash, says “Well this is embarrassing. Firefox is having trouble recovering your…” It makes it sound like the software (company) is admitting ownership of the problem, instead of implicating the user as the source of the problem, like so many error messages do.

It’s important to recognize when it’s most efficient to use conversational vs. more formal language. In an online form, for example, it may be best to switch the language to give directions like “please make sure to give at least one phone number”, while the headline of the form can still be written in a more conversational, casual style: “This’ll only take you a minute. But it’ll save you an hour later.*

You can argue that not all companies, brands, or services should use casual, conversational language. And of course, it depends on your target audience, too. But when you look at the world we live in, how our societies and culture have evolved, choosing a conversational style seems to make more sense than ever. In the online world in particular, because it’s two-way communication, and it’s all about conversations. It makes sense to talk to your audience like you’re having a conversation with them, not like you’re giving them orders or begging them to do something so that the system you’ve built can work.

Karri Ojanen

More about this in the blogosphere:
Conversational Writing vs. Formal Writing
Creating Conversation

In advertising, traditionally there’s been a need to get the customer’s attention and quickly sell an idea in a limited space and time, on the TV screen, a billboard, or a magazine. The Web has added a lot more to that. Now advertisers have to deal with instant interaction, pages and pages of content to be organized within a library framework, and software applications that can add functionality to the advertiser’s message.

So advertising agencies have been hiring IA types, user experience designers who can make sense out of the new medium by… drawing wireframes. The UXD people get to act as subject matter experts who answer questions about usability, state their opinion and POV on the ‘experience’ and do occasional testing, maybe extend their work into simple business analysis and creating personas.

An Uneasy Marriage of Old World Creative Thinking and New World Development

In the digital age, many advertising agencies think of their work as a marriage between two different worlds: traditional advertising that focuses on messaging, and software development, which is focused on designing products. Digital is merely a new ‘channel’ for advertising – like television, radio and print before. In most instances, this has been an uneasy marriage. Agencies have kept the old creative director, art director, copywriter triangle that they’ve had since the days of Mad Men, and tried to slap on a new layer of IAs, UXDs, or digital strategists – what ever title they’ve chosen to pick for this group of people supposed to make sense out of digital as new specialists on the team.

But what is the ‘user experience’ in advertising? Websites, even when they are just a couple pages for a simple campaign, need to, of course, be usable in the basic sense in order to successfully deliver the message. But on such level, ensuring usability should be the task of everybody on the team – creative director, designers, writers and developers – and, increasingly, it is. So what are usability experts still needed for at an ad agency?

Big Ideas Turn Flat in Digital

Many creative directors, even those who have done most of their work in digital, are trained to think of a ‘big idea’ as the starting point of the process of creating advertising. In interactive communication, however, the big idea model can lead to a very flat functional concept, no matter how beautifully executed it is in terms of traditional design. In digital media, there is much more than just an image, or animation, and text – there is a whole layer of functionality, which often doesn’t get properly utilized by people who are trained to think of big ideas to send out a message instead of a functional concept to offer a service or a tool that aids the message.

Make the User Experience Designer Your Creative Director

The solution is to make the user experience designer the creative director. Not just any user experience designer type, but the kind that can think in terms of functional concepts, of which creative design is then a part of. When an ad agency looks for a creative director, they should make sure the person has a solid insight and experience of usability, and an understanding of a user experience designer’s field of work. This is not yet the norm.

Many digital ad agencies also from time to time do projects, where there is a need for a usability specialist in the role of a subject matter expert, but they don’t form the bulk of the work, and can usually be handled by a contractor. I’m not saying that there is no need for user experience design or information architecture in digital advertising – there’s just no need for a specialized, subject matter expert -type information architect. Instead, there’s a need for a savvy, functionality-driven creative director – a concept designer – who understands user experience design, or a strong creative director + user experience designer duo working in tandem, truly understanding each others’ roles.

Karri Ojanen

In his article, he talks about how the Swedes don’t actually care all that much about advertising. When they started working with the Internet in the ‘90s, they were just excited by the incredible communication and creative possibilities that the new technology enabled, and only later became to be known as the creators of a really great share of the world’s most innovative advertising. And, Patrick writes, now the Swedes seem to be moving away from advertising into developing their own online products and social tools, and specializing in areas like gaming or corporate dot-com development.

The exact same applies to other Nordic digital agencies: having worked through the developments of the industry in Finland myself, I know that the thinking of the people behind the most innovative agencies there is very close to that of the Swedes. Danish agencies have, as well, contributed their fair share to the pool of Lion-grabbing work from the Nordics.

Part of the success of the Nordics can be easily explained: Denmark, Sweden and Finland all share a culture of elegant design, state support for infrastructure (Finland recently declared access to high-speed broadband Internet a legal right), and a long line of famous architects, product design and engineering. In broadband and mobile penetration, the Nordics have always been ahead of much of the world.

But the second reason to their success has to do with what Patrick Gardner manages to touch only softly in his post: the (mostly) young and wild Nordic kids who are behind the agencies that have since gone to not only steal the attention at Eurobest but to set up offices in the New World as well, didn’t come from a traditional advertising background. When they started creating their digital work, they didn’t think of the traditional model of CD+art director+copywriter, and then add a couple strategists, IAs and developers in the picture. They created their own roles and model of working that is closer to product design and creative software engineering than poster production or scriptwriting. Even when their work turns out to be a YouTube clip similar, in format, to a TV commercial, their non-traditional roots show in both the creative idea and the execution. What they may have lacked in sophistication in message-making, research and measurement, they have always had in sheer creative energy and a realistic grasp of the new digital culture and mindset.

Patrick Gardner’s post falls a bit short and the conclusions in the end seem hastily drawn. Several people note that in the comments. But I hope that his text doesn’t go unnoticed in North America. Because even if the Nordic creators can’t see into the future any better than anyone else, at least they have realized one thing from the start: the future is not what it used to be. It’s something different. We can’t create something new by just taking the old and adding a new layer to it. If the media we use has changed, then why not the org chart and the roles as well? And with the ongoing development of the digital tools and culture around us, we will all need to pay more and more attention to long term product development than short term messaging.

Karri Ojanen

This is something that we often struggle with in our work in digital advertising. Much as a result of the waterfall model and the general legacy of the industrial era production line mentality, we tend to separate the problems in creative design, user experience, strategy, and technology. And we separate the people who look for solutions to those problems. The technology team gets to step in only when the strategist and the creative director have finished their work. They come together somewhere in the middle to discuss solutions in check-in meetings, over a couple wireframes and comps, before heading back to their own chambers.

The problems that arise from this separation are most pressing in, to go back to Alvar Aalto with a modern twist, information architecture and user experience design. The danger is that we separate ourselves from our audience. Because when the audience looks at the campaign we’ve built, the process we’ve engineered on a website or in a mobile app, or the social networking components we’ve brought into a digital billboard ad, the audience doesn’t consume the pieces of the design and the functionality separately. They get the total experience – the sum of all the choices we’ve made in strategy, in tactics, in visual design, copy and code.

Realizing this has been somewhat easier in actual software development than in the world of advertising. Where in the past, advertisers were limited to a one-way message that could fit on a billboard, in a TV commercial or a print brochure, the Web has brought a library framework combined with a software application platform to the people who used to focus just on getting the customer’s attention and selling an idea in the limited space and time without instant interaction with the target audience. Like Erica DeJoannis points out in this excellent article about UXD in the world of marketing, marketers and UX designers approach online marketing in two fundamentally different ways. Marketers are focused on selling and messaging, while UX designers are focused on designing products.

To help UX designers and marketers work together more efficiently as well as to help high level strategy connect with the low level tactics more effectively, we need to get out of our silos. When the architect is sketching the blueprints, the builder aka the technical developer needs to be as close as the visual designer and the strategist. The solution to a strategic or architectural problem may well come from the mouth of a programmer, and we all contribute to the same product together.

Karri Ojanen

Games, and namely video games, are addictive. Just look at the Nintendo Wii craze, or Sony Playstation before that, and all successful video games, consoles and computer games since the 1970′s. People give games lots and lots of their time over long stretches. They keep coming back to them, ignoring several other, more important influences in their lives.

Marketers have known this for long, and you can find mainstream consumer products (and a certain presidential candidate’s campaign ads) placed in video games. Agencies are telling their corporate clients that brands need to do things with games.

But Jonathan thinks that instead of brands doing things with games, games need to do things to brands. We shouldn’t twist games to support our old ideas about brands, and have brands use game tactics. Instead, brand (and business) strategies should get configured like games, says Jonathan. “Marketers mistakenly see games as a lowest-common-denominator channel, instead of realizing that games are not channels at all, but rather places, like social media, only with a purpose,” he continues.  Games are models of places where people live, worlds that have rules, roles, expected behaviors, and even dimensions of time. Perhaps most important, video games are places where people go to do things. Games are built upon creative ideas, but they’re experienced with behavior, says Jonathan.

I can’t think of any close examples of that yet. Can’t say that I’ve seen any brand designed like a game. But I find the idea really thrilling. And I noticed this upcoming webinar, organized by Rosenfeld Media and given by John Ferrara, on extending game design to business applications. It’s not exactly the same as what Jonathan Salem Baskin writes about, but nevertheless I’ll sign up for it. If anybody has examples of brands like games, please comment. I first thought of the old Nokia Game and other ARGs, but those are not quite the thing.

Photo credit: David Farrant (Creative Commons)

Karri Ojanen

You can read the whole article in his GeekMedia blog here, together with his presentation that is also available on Slideshare (the illustration above is my own, but inspired by by Graeme’s text).  As a teaser for the article, here are some of my favorite bits from it:

“The next big development will be the move from the Internet of data to the internet of things – everything can communicate with everything else.”

“We are going to move over the next few years from millions of computers CONNECTED by the internet, to one huge computer that IS the internet. Every device will be a window into it.”

“This will obviously mean that a huge amount of data is flying around, and that where there is more information, there is less attention. So brands will have to work even harder to earn that attention.”

“Remember, the internet is not a medium, it is a way of organising and structuring information. To have more chance of unlocking its potential, we need to think of it in terms of other systems for structuring information. For example, the alphabet. We haven’t worried about relying on the alphabet to store our information for the last 1500 years. And we don’t use the alphabet as an advertising medium. Well, we do, obviously – copy is written in words, ideas are created and sold in words. But it is something so fundamental that it goes on in the background. If we think of technology in terms of media channels like TV and radio, our frame of reference is too narrow.”

I like this post by Jokko, and I’m looking forward to seeing the visualization of this he plans to do. Read the full post here.

• Information architecture (IA) deals with the organization structure, labels and navigation of web sites, intranets, online communities, and, in my work, campaign microsites. That is only part of my work.
• Interaction design (IxD), which defines the behavior (i.e. the interaction) of a web site, campaign microsite, intranet, online application or community is another part of my work.
• User experience design (UXD) – all aspects of the user’s experience when interacting with a web site or other online product – encompasses both IA and IxD.
• Marketing strategy and planning inevitably form another part of my role, even when there are actual strategists and planners working with me.

When I worked in Finland, I got used to working under the title of concept designer. After my move to Canada I’ve had to get used to the idea of being called an information architect instead. One benefit of being a concept designer was that it made it quite easy for people to understand that I, as concept designer, in order to create the concept for the site/campaign/application needed to be part of the initial ideation process. I got together with the account director and project manager and art director and key developer right from the beginning to create and discuss ideas for the concept. There was a healthy amount of collaboration between different members of the team. Concept models were generally well brewed and the concept designer’s role worked hand in hand with pitch work/sales.

Here in Canada it’s been difficult to get people to think that the IA should be informed and involved from the beginning of ideation. Here there’s less collaboration and co-ordination around the IA’s, and everybody else’s, work. That, together with the fact that my work doesn’t consist of just information architecture but also much more, is a reason why I think it would make strong sense to call my position here something else than ‘information architect’.

The downside of the Finnish model of ‘concept design’ was that it didn’t always pay as much attention to detail as it should’ve. Wireframes weren’t always created as well as at least bigger site projects would’ve required, which left visual designers and developers dealing with the details and nuances of the designed concept later. The concept design model worked well for smaller, quick marketing campaign projects, which often form the bulk of digital advertising agencies’ work, but not so well for bigger site projects, which we also got to do.

I draw my information, examples and material from various sources including marketing magazines, the Information Architecture Institute, the Interaction Design Association, and user experience design books of all kinds. While I think that the Finnish concept design model worked slightly better for the work of an IA/IxD/UXD at an ad agency, it wasn’t perfect either, as I point out above.

Ottawa-based Overlay.TV officially launched about a week ago, and they promise to do just that. The Overlay.TV platform offers a simple way for publishers to link images within a video to marketers’ websites. That cola can you saw in a music video and the shirt that the singer was wearing can be made clickable and linked to coolcola.com and madstylezz.net, for instance. The platform works with all major browsers, including Internet Explorer and Firefox, and seems very easy to use. The overlays look a bit bulky, I think, but the system works.

I am a little sceptic about how many consumers will be instantly thrilled about being able to click on things seen in a (low quality, compressed YouTube) video clip, but marketers and e-commerce sites will probably find Overlays a useful tool. I’ll keep an eye on this concept for sure.