by Ernest Kim

We’re very proud to announce the launch of our latest project, the completely re-concepted, re-architected, re-engineered and re-designed Maxis.com.my—the online home for Maxis Berhad, Malaysia’s only integrated communications service provider.

Maxis has a clear vision: To bring the future to its customers’ lives and businesses, in a manner that’s simple, personalized and enriching. And the company has worked tirelessly to bring this vision to life, having launched Malaysia’s first high-speed network in 2005, Malaysia’s first 4G LTE network earlier this year and, today, offering the nation’s largest high-speed network.

But Maxis recognized that its Web site was no longer delivering on this commitment, so the company partnered with XM Asia Pacific to conceptualize and implement an entirely new online experience.

Built from the ground up around responsive Web design principles by the XM Asia team, the new Maxis site renders beautifully across the range of devices in use today, from phones to tablets to traditional PCs.

“Maxis wanted to break away from the typical telco Web experience,” recalled Hema Thiagarajah, Consumer Experience Director at XM Asia Pacific. “The norm for the industry is to list products and services based on an internal org chart, and to sell using telco-speak that most consumers find perplexing. But Maxis felt it was crucial to connect with their customers and reach them in a way that would be familiar and useful … to have a conversation.” Read the rest of this entry »

by Ernest Kim

Tech publication, The Verge, recently published a fantastic piece on the rising design culture at Google—a company that, historically, has been known more for its engineering than its aesthetic sensibilities.

And it’s not just your typical fluff piece. Provided a surprising level of inside access to the people who are actually driving this cultural shift—folks like Jon Wiley, Lead Designer for Google Search—there’s quite a bit of substance, including a brief look at an earlier design initiative called Kanna that failed to take hold.

A peek behind the scenes of Google’s design process.

This latest effort is called Project Kennedy, an allusion to John F. Kennedy’s insanely ambitious “Man on the Moon” speech from 1961, which inspired the US to achieve the goal of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” before that decade had ended.

The fascinating thing is that while Project Kennedy is animated by the vision of Google CEO Larry Page, there’s no one person in charge of the effort. Quoting Andrey Doronichev, Senior Product Manager for YouTube Mobile, “We don’t have a single mastermind designer.” So, unlike Apple, where the design bar is effectively set and maintained by one person—previously Steve Jobs and now Jony Ive—at Google, the goal is to weave a shared, co-created design ethos into the fabric of the company as a whole.

There is a catalyst in the form of a secretive group called Google UXA, which is described in only the vaguest terms in the Verge piece. But it’s really up to the members of the various product teams to bring this ever evolving design vision to life. People like Darren Delaye, lead designer on Google Maps for Mobile, who explains that “Designers take the design language from cross-product initiatives like Kennedy and weave that together with the user needs for their particular product.”

Design is really about practical imagination … imagining possibilities, and making them real. One of the essential parts of that is to do it. You just have to do a lot of it. Iterate a lot. Look at everything. And only when you’ve done it—done like every possible variation you can think of—then you realize, oh, there’s actually one thing we didn’t try … let’s try that.
— Matias Duarte, Senior Director of Android User Experience

The result is a shared vernacular that enables a degree of “Googley” consistency across sites, apps and platforms, while still giving individual product teams the flexibility to “move fast” and craft experiences optimized for specific use cases.

A few key takeaways for anyone daunted by the length of the Verge piece:

• Cultural change within an organization must come from the top. Even in a company as committed to internal collaboration as Google has always been, a shift in cultural priorities to embrace design could only take hold with the full backing of the CEO. In the words of renowned management consultant Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” And cultural change within corporations does not happen from the bottom up—it takes the drive and commitment of an engaged leadership.
• Iteration is central to success in digital. As noted by Matias Duarte, Google’s Senior Director of Android User Experience, effective design requires doing, doing and more doing. This is a lesson that marketers—many of whom are more accustomed to a one-and-done campaign approach—must learn to embrace if they hope to successfully engage consumers in the digital space.
• The perfect is the enemy of the good, and nowhere is this more true than in digital. An oft repeated sentiment captured in the Verge piece was Googlers’ recognition of the need to “move fast.” According to Google Search design lead Jon Wiley, among Larry Page’s first directives upon assuming the CEO role in April of 2011 was to “redesign all of our products.” And, within three months, “Google shipped fresh new versions of Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, and Calendar.” None of these were perfect, but they were better, and with each subsequent iteration they were made better still. As Steve Jobs famously said, “Great artists ship,” and Google is proving that, in the digital space, the spoils go to those who can ship both faster and better.

Yes, the piece is long, but it’s a great read for anyone interested in design, UX, product management or organizational change. And don’t miss the accompanying video, which includes on-camera interviews with many of the people bringing Google’s new design culture to life.

Astro together with XM Malaysia created the World’s Longest Online Banner in conjunction with Astro On-The-Go’s “Where do YOU want Astro On-The-Go contest” which encouraged Astro On-The-Go users to show off their most creative locations they would love to enjoy Astro On-The Go.

The online banner with a length of 61,500 pixels (68 feet), tripling the length of the previous longest online banner length of 18,001 pixels (20 Feet) is the world’s longest banner.

World’s Longest Banner

The “Where do YOU want Astro On-The-Go contest” ran from July to August 2012 as a promotional effort for Astro On-The-Go, Astro’s latest innovative service delivering non-stop entertainment anytime, anywhere via smartphones, tablets and laptops.

To view all 61,500 pixels of it, visit http://www.astroonthego.com/contest

by Paul Soon and Gerard Lim

As sure as Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological perch, the near future will see brands surrounded by authentic consumer dialog without being poked, prodded and cajoled by hired ‘guns’ such as bloggers and community managers.

The future is a society where brands and consumers form a behavioral bond of mutual trust; where the former listens and transforms to meet the needs and desires of the latter. In return, consumers will allow brands to be part of their lives and share personal data readily.

The future will see big and small data being utilized with greater transparency. Brands and consumers will have a shared goal of building ever-improving, personalized experiences to enrich and fulfill daily lives.

Watch our CEO, Paul Soon, talk to Campaign Asia-Pacific about the future of brands and marketing communications.

The biggest challenge every CMO faces today is to continue to build and preserve relevant brand equity in the face of higher consumer expectations amidst the complex digital evolution that marches on even as you read this.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Ernest Kim

I recently came across a deeply interesting, deeply insightful look at the potential of Apple’s Siri platform written by a self-described “veteran design and management surgeon” known as Kontra.

It’s a long piece and somewhat technical, but absolutely worth a read if you have any kind of interest in human-computer interaction and the future of mobile interfaces, inclusive of mobile search and mobile commerce.

Here’s a snippet:

Siri’s opportunity here to win the hearts and minds of users is to change the rules of the game from relatively rigid, linear and largely decontextualized CLI [Command Line Interface] search towards a much more humane approach where the user ‘declares’ his intent but doesn’t have to tell Siri how do it every step of the way.

In essence, he’s talking about semantic search, but in a much more powerful manifestation; one in which the source of the “semantics” goes beyond language and extends to the panoply of input sources available to any modern smartphone, such as GPS, accelerometers, cameras, microphones and the interaction data collected from first- and third-party apps.

Will Siri become a pillar of Apple’s business akin to the App Store or go the way of the recently retired Ping? Self-described “design and management surgeon” Kontra takes us on a deep exploration of the potential.

This gets even more powerful when you consider that our always-on devices can access not only our own, personal interaction histories, but—with the continued growth of cloud-based platforms—the aggregated interaction histories of hundreds of millions of others, segments of which will undoubtedly share interests and patterns of behavior similar to our own.

What are the potential implications of a Siri (or Google Now) dominated world for marketers? Kontra offers some opinions on this as well:

A transactional Siri has the seeds to shake up the $500 billion global advertising industry. For a consumer with intent to purchase, the ideal input comes close to “pure” information, as opposed to ephemeral ad impression or a series of search results which need to be parsed by the user. Siri, well-oiled by the very rich contextual awareness of a personal mobile device, could deliver “pure” information with unmatched relevance at the time it’s most needed.

Give the whole piece a read if you have a chance, then make sure to come on back and share your thoughts here. I should note, too, that in addition to his blog, Kontra is active on Twitter as @counternotions.

XM’s Ernest Kim recently spoke with Campaign Asia about Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm and what recent changes made by the social network mean to brands. That article can be viewed on the Campaign Asia-Pacific Web site. For XM blog readers who’d like even more detail, here’s a full transcript of Ernest’s interview with Campaign.

Q. Facebook’s recent updates to their EdgeRank algorithm—what does it mean to brands? What is the impact?
A. It might help to first step back for a minute to talk about what EdgeRank is. Read the rest of this entry »