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

Please be forewarned: Much interface design geekery ahead. If the acronyms HCI and UX mean nothing to you, or the word skeuomorphism brings to mind an alien flick, it’s probably best to move along … these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

For the few who are left, you’re almost certainly familiar with the rage expressed by much of the digerati towards Apple’s broad use of skeuomorphism, or the simulation of the physical world in their digital interfaces. An oft cited example is the Find My Friends app for iOS, which, for no discernible reason, features an interface swathed in leather textures and stitching. Another example is Apple’s iBooks app, which displays the reader’s collection on a set of wooden bookshelves and requires her to flow through content by mimicking the act of turning pages in a physical book (a continuous scrolling option was added in a recent update, but the book metaphor remains the default user experience).

The leatherific interface of Apple’s Find My Friends app for iOS, widely cited as among the most egregious applications of skeuomorphism in modern interface design. Still, I would argue that those criticizing Apple’s approach are missing the UX forest for the UI trees (<–proof that tortured metaphors can come in all forms).

The spread of these real world metaphors across both Mac OS X and iOS has driven even Apple die-hards, such as the writers at the popular Apple fan blog, Cult of Mac, to conclude that “Microsoft’s operating systems have ‘more taste’ than Apple’s.” This is a reference to Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows Phone OSes, which share a very different sort of interface. Read the rest of this entry »

by Ernest Kim

This piece by Johan Johansson on the three leading approaches to mobile site development should be required reading for any site dev: A Comparison of Methods for Building Mobile-Optimized Websites.

He identifies the three leading approaches as:

• Responsive Web Design (RWD)
• Dedicated Mobile Site
• Responsive Web Design With Server Side Components (RESS)

Most of the articles I’ve read on this topic are written from the perspective of developers or domain experts who strongly advocate one specific approach. Johansson’s piece is fantastic because he provides a dispassionate look at all three, including real world pros and cons for each.

Responsive Web design (as illustrated in the World Wildlife Fund screenshot) is among the hotter buzz phrases in digital today, but is it the right approach for your site? Veteran Web developer, Johan Johansson, explains why a dedicated mobile site (as illustrated in the Amazon.com screenshot), or an advanced blend of the two called RESS, might be the better way to go.

And you can tell he’s an actual dev who’s gotten his hands dirty and not just a “thought leader,” because he addresses issues like page load times and search engine optimization (SEO), which are often overlooked by the digital blowhards who talk a big game when it comes to theory, but have never actually built anything that needs to work for users in the real world.

Johansson does conclude with an acknowledgement of his own, preferred approach (in the spirit of transparency, I should disclose that I agree with his conclusion), but does so without suggesting that it’s the one, “right” way to go.

Give his piece a read if you can, and share your perspective below. Also note that you can follow @johansson_johan on Twitter.

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.

by Ernest Kim

With the 2012 US presidential election finally coming to a close, I thought it was worth exploring the role data and technology played in the outcome. There will be many, many stories in the weeks ahead that dissect the ins-and-outs of the two campaigns and seek to explain Barack Obama’s victory by a margin wider than most pundits had predicted. The two best I’ve seen thus far that take the digital perspective are a piece from Bloomberg Businessweek that was actually published back in June and a fantastic, peek-behind-the-curtain story just posted by Time magazine.

Here’s a prescient quote from the Businessweek article: “The unspoken hope in Chicago is that superior strategy and a shrewd use of technology can make up for Obama’s diminished stature and more formidable opponent. So [Obama campaign manager Jim] Messina has spent 18 months studying and building.”

From Whitehouse.gov: President Barack Obama hugs his campaign manager, Jim Messina, during an unannounced stop at his campaign headquarters in Chicago, Ill., Nov. 7, 2012.

And the results speak for themselves. I highly encourage you to read these two pieces if you want to understand how digital platforms can drive real world behavior. But, if you’re in a rush and need a summary, here are my three key takeaways for marketers:

1. Set meaningful goals.
In this case, winning the election was obviously the ultimate goal, but feeding into this were subsidiary goals including concrete fundraising and volunteer recruitment targets that directly supported that primary objective. Too often in the digital space, marketers confuse metrics such as visits, Likes and follower counts for meaningful goals. And, so long as this is the case, Chief Executives will view marketing as a cost-center rather than a business driver.

2. Understand your audience.
Specifically, segment your audience to enable more targeted, impactful engagement. Quoting from the Time piece:

Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn’t just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign’s most important priorities first … “We could [predict] people who were going to give online. We could model people who were going to give through mail. We could model volunteers,” said one of the senior advisers about the predictive profiles built by the data. “In the end, modeling became something way bigger for us in ’12 than in ’08 because it made our time more efficient.”

3. Build, test, iterate, rinse and repeat.
Our industry loves to talk about testing and optimization, but so few of us actually follow through. Either there’s not enough time, or not enough money or, by the time the data is analyzed, we’re already on to the next thing. But success in the digital space comes to the iterators. Again, quoting from the Time story:

A large portion of the cash raised online came through an intricate, metric-driven e-mail campaign in which dozens of fundraising appeals went out each day. Here again, data collection and analysis were paramount. Many of the e-mails sent to supporters were just tests, with different subject lines, senders and messages … Michelle Obama’s e-mails performed best in the spring, and at times, campaign boss Messina performed better than Vice President Joe Biden. In many cases, the top performers raised 10 times as much money for the campaign as the underperformers.

And, finally, I just had to include this fascinating bit from the Businessweek article—though Apple is not known as a company that necessarily ‘gets’ social media, this anecdote from Messina suggests that Steve Jobs had a deeper understanding of our modern media landscape than was widely recognized:

In two long, private conversations, Steve Jobs tore into Messina for all the White House was doing wrong and what it ought to be doing differently, before going on to explain how the campaign could exploit technology in ways that hadn’t been possible before. “Last time you were programming to only a couple of channels,” Jobs told him, meaning the Web and e-mail. “This time, you have to program content to a much wider variety of channels—Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, Google—because people are segmented in a very different way than they were four years ago.” When Obama declared for president, the iPhone hadn’t been released. Now, Jobs told him, mobile technology had to be central to the campaign’s effort. “He knew exactly where everything was going,” Messina says.

Instead of bright yellow, sunshine, teenage romance/bromance ‘lovin the moment, McDonald’s has been getting quite a lot of attention online with their recent gay TVC. Yes, getting attention. But is this TVC really worth talking about, passionately? Is there a story that really connects to our hearts? Probably not. Is this just an attempt for a big corporation trying to be socially relevant and also an attempt to produce a very safe “controversial ad”? Probably. While I applaud the increasing number of markets accepting the fact that social media is really more than just another channel for communications, or even as a platform for conversations (theoretically yes, but in reality, no one’s going to your website to talk to you unless you are the subservient chicken from Burger King.), however the next step to that is really to create relevant content that speaks to the heart. Seriously, who cares if a guy eating at McDonald’s is gay or not?

So why is it getting attention online? Poor sentiments spread too. Spoken about with alot of passion? Ho-Hum.