In the tech community, some folks have been talking about “augmented reality” for years. But only recently has it started to really catch the attention of a more mainstream crowd. What is this seemingly sci-fi catchphrase, and why should you be paying attention?

What IS Augmented Reality?

Augmented Reality (or AR) has been referred to as a way to “layer ‘virtual story worlds’ over the real world“.

Ever listen to an audio guide while traveling? You were augmenting your experience audibly. Augmented reality can allow you to do this visually as well.

How’s THAT possible?

Chris Grayson has created this simple video to explain how a combination of features on your cell phone can make mobile-aware AR possible:

And this is for real?

Yup! Owners of the iPhone 3GS users can get their first taste of AR googness in the new Yelp application. While there has been some controversy surrounding the inclusion of such a feature in the application, this doesn’t overshadow the significance of its inclusion at all.

The Yelp iPhone app has always offered an ability for users to find services based on their location, but Augmented Reality allows for an enhanced user experience. Looking through the “monocle”, you can see the street in front of you, but with Yelp results superimposed.

So what’s the controversy?

Developers had been asking for the ability to include Augmented Reality in their applications, and Apple had told them to wait until the next iPhone Operating System (3.1) upgrade. The Yelp developers tapped into some undocumented, private APIs to build out this functionality. The concern among developers is that this may further cause Apple to slow down the approval process on new applications to ensure they’re not violating the App Store rules. (Note: I seem to recall a Google App that did the same thing, without so much uproar).

Cool, sure. But where’s the applicability to my organization?

With AR just starting to seem viable and likely to have mass appeal, we’ve only started to consider where it may be used:

• historical recreations of places (i.e. tours)
• traffic updates
• how-to instructional guides
• home renovations/decorating

The iPhone is so cutting edge to support this!

Hm.. well, not really: the Android phone has supported Layar, an Augmented Reality browser, for several weeks now. And Augmented reality isn’t just a “mobile phone thing”, it is also showing up in the Entertainment industry in full force.

Below is a product demo of a new augmented reality game coming out from PlayStation in a few months:

For more about augmented reality, you can check out the Facebook page dedicated to such, or tagged articles on ReadWriteWeb.

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No one talks about Web 2.0 anymore. This may be because we now talk about social media, and at first blush, we may assume the terms are interchangeable. Sure, Web 2.0 was a great term to use to describe the evolution of Websites: from ‘Web 1.0’, when we went online to read, and ‘Web 2.0’ where we had the ability to publish, comment and remix.

But social media isn’t about Web sites. It’s not about places, or sites, at all. My stock phrase: social media is about people using technology to communicate.

Web 2.0 described the relationship between people and online content. They could now publish, comment or edit. The relationship was about a person and … stuff. Social media describes the relationship between people, and technology is simply what makes that relationship easier, or possible at all.

I’ve never considered a Wiki “social media”. Yet it’s a fine example of Web 2.0 technology: anyone can easily create or modify content on the Internet. I actually tweeted this perception, and Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison LLC asked how I would categorize Flickr or Youtube.

Beyond the fact that those are specific properties (and I much prefer to speak to concepts than specific services), I appreciated the question, as it helped me to refine my thoughts. Flickr and Youtube are great examples of the power of Web 2.0, as there may be value to using the services even without engagement with others. An individual may choose to store and categorize their own content on Flickr without ever engaging with others in a social fashion.

Compare this to Twitter, which really can’t be much fun at all if you’re the only one there (remember Pownce?). Twitter is a service based around connections between people. I can use Wiki software for myself simply because of the ease of publishing (and indeed, I did: all my masters thesis work is in a Wiki).

I admit, the lines may seem blurry, and for many, they don’t matter at all. But instead of assuming we need to incorporate “social” aspects into every online initiative we take on, it may be worth asking ourselves which benefits of the online realm we really wish to exploit. Is it the ease of engagement and manipulation of content, or is it about facilitating relationships between people?

Sometimes, old school Web 2.0 may be just what we need.

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While at Resource Interactive, I took training in and worked on several products with the ATG product suite. ATG is at the core an e-commerce solutions provider, with a stated goal as follows:

Our goal: to power the world’s most engaging and rewarding online shopping experiences. We are our customers’ first stop in providing the solutions, services, and ongoing guidance needed to power a more relevant, personal e-commerce Web site; continually attract and captivate new prospects; convert them to buyers; and ensure their satisfaction so they become loyal, repeat, profitable customers.” (emphasis mine)

How can software ensure something is engaging, rewarding and personal? Well, by offering a more personalized experience, I suppose. When I was enrolled in ATG training last Spring, we spent a fair amount of time learning how to display relevant content based on explicit user-specified preferences and more subtle user behavior on the site. Increasingly, we come to expect that our experience on a web site will precisely meet our own needs. And indeed, with the plethora of resources online competing for our attention, web visitors have the luxury of looking elsewhere if a site is frustrating or in any way lacking.

Amazon.com and Pandora are two well-known services that make recommendations based on the users’ previous interactions with the site. In some way, this is the equivalent of the waitress remembering our “usual” and letting us know about something new on the menu they think we’ll enjoy; we are forming a relationship, and there are inherent benefits thereto.

Both of these services offer suggestions based on what we’ve done. But as the web becomes increasingly social, the notion of leveraging the wisdom of the crowds and the power of personal influence may come into play. You’ve likely seen this before, but did you pay attention? Again, Amazon lets you know what others purchased. Does this help sway your decision, or introduce other options?

Facebook taps more directly into your network. Friend suggestions may be based on your networks, your employment or school history, shared friends.. or other attributes. Recently several people have noted they are being suggested friends who share the same name as their existing friends. Unlike the Amazon and Pandora examples earlier, there is no link to see why these items are being suggested: Facebook is blatant in their name-dropping. The entire basis of their social ads (in all the incarnations, from beacon to sponsored ads with photos to friend recommendations) is to serve up “tailored ads” based on “actions your friends have taken on the site”. Whereas ATG stuck to providing an enriched experience based on an individual’s behavior, this extends to their trust network as well.

Recommendations are intended to offer a more engaging, personalized experience. Or to increase interaction and sell product or services. Recommendations may be subtle (showing contextually-relevant content), or explicit (“you may also like”). The rationale behind the suggestions may be disclosed or suppressed from the user, and lastly the recommendations may be made based on system rules, the behavior of the user or the behavior of the user’s network.

Are there certain situations where these different types of recommendations work well? Obviously for explicit recommendations based on the behaviors of friends, the site must be aware of such a network. But beyond those logistics, there must be merit to such a recommendation. I’m not necessarily going to select a paint color, a washer and dryer or a home based on the preferences or buying habits of my network. But offering me a complementary color palette based on a color I select provides a useful service. In contrast, the recommendation of something social like an event is likely to be much more effective if it comes from someone within a trusted network.

How do you think these different types of recommendations affect your purchase or engagement decisions? Are any more appealing than others?

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In his first book, Designing the Obvious, Robert Hoekman, Jr. described seven core tenets of great Web application design:

1. Build only what’s necessary
2. Quickly turn beginning users into intermediates
3. Prevent errors whenever possible and handle the errors we cannot prevent gracefully
4. Reduce and refine interactions and task flows until even the most complicated applications are clear and understandable
5. Design to support a specific activity
6. Make constant, incremental improvements to our processes and applications
7. Ignore the demands of users and stick to a vision

In his latest book, Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action, he focuses on the individual moments, the smaller interactions that must also take place to create an optimal user experience.

Reading the book is in itself an enjoyable experience: Hoekman’s writing style is conversational and interesting. This is not a dry manual of best practices or standards, but rather a series of short, easily-digestible case studies. Each chapter (after the first chapter, they are never longer than 10 pages each) covers a specific “moment” or interaction on a site. In almost every case, Hoekman shares a story of a specific project he worked on and why his design evolved as it did.

Not long ago I was speaking to someone about detail, and mentioned the discussions we’d have at LexisNexis about the placement of the Cancel button. I felt I’d found a kindred spirit in Hoekman, with his sections on “Avoid Login syndrome” (page 31), “Perfecting OK/Cancel” (with subsections ‘Primary and secondary actions’ and ‘it matters’ (page 101)).

Hoekman’s style is open and accessible: he speaks as from one designer to another, sharing his experience and suggestions. Most notably in Chapter 5, Getting Your Head out of the Tag Cloud, Hoekman starts off the paragraph admitting he doesn’t have all the answers:

I’d like to expand on that story a bit, because I’ve learned a few things since writing Designing the Obvious that have changed my perspective.

The entire book becomes a joy to read, because the reader is invited to form his own thoughts and opinions – indeed, this is explained right in the introduction. Yet despite the encouragement to read the book with a critical eye, I found myself understanding Hoekman’s perspective and appreciating his solutions throughout.

“Section 4: Diving In” was one of the most useful of the book, as it dealt with some more complicated features: playback controls, form design, and inline validation. These are all challenging aspects of interaction, and at the very least Hoekman’s justified recommendations can serve as a starting point for designers. I also appreciated the chapter on “Making Social Connections,” which focused more on why to add social features rather than how.

I would recommend this book for anyone interested in web or interaction design or development. Both new and experienced practitioners will glean some valuable insights from this enjoyable read.

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Sometimes 140 characters just isn’t enough.. Mark Scholl just tweeted: “Google now making an OS. Strategy of taking on Microsoft by becoming Microsoft?”

That is absolutely the only information I have on the OS. But yes, I already have thoughts.

My immediate response (but I have plenty more thoughts I’ll have to return to later, particularly after reading about it some):

Not so. Microsoft built a product, back when we bought commodities. Google is selling a service. We’ve already seen the “intelligence” that comes from Google knowing way more about us than we may expect. The Google OS is going to be a personalized experience, not a product we can just pick up and buy.
It’s an interesting idea, to jump into the OS field. I *think* it will hurt Linux more than MS. I can’t imagine enterprises going this route, despite the fact that Gmail and other services are finally “enterprise-ready” (for the past how many hours?)
So what if I run the Google OS at home and at work? Will the experiences both be tied to my Google account?

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In addition to being a marathon runner, I also recently started skating with one of the top ranked roller derby leagues in the nation, the Denver Roller Dolls. In addition to skating, every member of the league must serve on a committee. When I joined in January 2009, I made the simple choice to join the PMS committee (public relations, marketing, sponsorship), and quickly got involved on the website redesign project that was taking place.

The project was fun because it was well within my comfort zone, yet I got to sit on the “client” side of the table for once. I’ve been able to derive and execute on strategy with almost complete support from others. It’s an ongoing effort, but it’s certainly been enjoyable thus far.

The site design and development was already underway before I joined the committee: Ryan Lee of Think to Make came up with a great design, and pulled in developer KC Tunstan of 525Creative to make it come to life. As a recovering developer, obviously I’m the worst sort of client, but I was really impressed with KC’s work and his dedication to the project. The guys did a great job at incorporating a few of the last minute suggestions I threw in: adding news to the homepage and a twitter feed to the fans section.

The site was built with Expression Engine, and KC provided great documentation for updating the site. As a result, we’re no longer limited to having a few individuals with HTML experience updating the site. Because we’re an organization based on events (bouts, service projects, appearances), it was important that information could be added easily and expire automatically. KC also created three RSS feeds for us: News, Events and Bouts.

Two weeks ago, the Denver Roller Dolls were featured on Fox 31 news, and we decided it was time to “flip the switch”. The new site was live: now, did anyone know (or care?)

Before each bout, we give away a few pairs of tickets via social media. This month I ran a twitter promotion that encouraged individuals to “tweet to win”. Yes, after reading the ReadWriteWeb article that basically called this sort of promotion “spam”, I feel bad about it, but at the time I felt it was a great way to introduce our new site – people visited our site for contest details, and hopefully explored it further.

The RSS feed I mentioned earlier? Of course I created a widget from it, to make it easier for our fans to receive updates about our activities. I run the RSS feed through Feedburner so that I could monitor subscriptions and item use.

With the ease with which we can now do site updates, I’ve been eager to ensure our news is getting pushed out to our other online outlets. I don’t maintain our MySpace, Facebook or Twitter profiles, but I’ve been working with Jersey Trouble to figure out how best to use these sites. We recently created a ping.fm account to ensure consistent messaging across several of the platforms, and just make it easier on ourselves to continue to offer our fans fresh content.

Just as I preach to clients that you can’t simply build a great website and expect people to flock to it, my current focus is to drive people to our website. The other day University of Denver film student Beca Freitas-Wolfe posted “Rollermama” on Vimeo. This was a film she produced with fellow students Jason Bach and Kim Crane, featuring some of our players. Rather than pointing people to Vimeo to view the great short, I pulled it into our own video gallery and promoted Rollermama on the Denver Roller Dolls website instead.

The fun part about a side project is the lack of constraints, the challenging part about a side project is the lack of accountability. I have plenty of ideas to further enhance the online presence of the league, but I want to ensure that I’m being responsible to the league and their overall objectives and not acting independently. Still, it’s been a fun project thus far and I look forward to continuing to work on our organization’s digital initiatives.

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I’m not a web designer, by any means. Sure, I have a graphic design certificate, but my design skills pretty well peaked in 2003 when I completed the online program (although my portfolio is still featured on the sessions.edu site!)

But as someone who’s been taking amazing designs and making them functional for close to a decade, I have some ideas as to what makes design work for the web.

1. Anticipate changes

Who reads webpages anymore? People want content to be updated frequently. That means limit the custom typography or graphic headers (or at least consider how to use custom fonts on your site. Look at blogs: they are really text documents, perhaps with an image inserted. If the image isn’t there, the page is still available. If every page on your site requires a custom graphic before it’s published, you’re slowing down your time to release. Similarly, don’t build so rigid a design that the change of a word or phrase will throw off the entire page layout. Things change

2. Respect the medium

Unless you’re building an RIA (rich internet application), these are PAGES. They should read like a page, with a title and body copy. Think about your content as you would a text document: is it logical from a glance what the hierarchy of content is?

3. Be consistent

Unlike a print ad that may stand on its own, a website is a complete entity. Use the same conventions across the site, in terms of fonts and layout. If you deviate from it, make sure it is intentional and of benefit to the site visitor.

4. Anticipate people arriving on any page of your site

With Google indexing every page of your site and people being able to share pages with friends, you must anticipate that not everyone will visit your home page first. Does your site make sense to someone arriving on an interior page? Can they navigate elsewhere through the site?

5. Get an interaction designer to help

…yes, it’s a cop-out. But one key feature that web offers over print is the opportunity for interaction. There is no equivalent in a print design for error messaging, progressive disclosure, or user flows. I see the evolution from print to web design as both a widening (you are designing a series of pages that are related) and a refining (you are designing components or micro-interactions within a single larger design). Many will argue that an Interaction designer uses none of the same tools as a graphic designer, and I shouldn’t assume a straight-forward transition. Yet I’m not sure that every team can have both an interaction and a graphic designer, so at some point those skill sets need to merge.

As Jakob Neilsen stated back in 1999:

Anything that is a great print design is likely to be a lousy web design.There are so many differences between the two media that it is necessary to take different design approaches to utilize the strengths of each medium and minimize its weaknesses.

• Print design is based on letting the eyes walk over the information, selectively looking at information objects and using spatial juxtaposition to make page elements enhance and explain each other.
• Web design functions by letting the hands move the information (by scrolling or clicking); information relationships are expressed temporally as part of an interaction and user movement.

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Have you ever wondered why most websites use the same handful of fonts? There are only a limited number of fonts that every computer ships with. These are known as “web-safe fonts“, and most developers stay within that selection to ensure a consistent experience for all site visitors.

So how do you get beyond Verdana and Times New Roman? There are three options:

1. Images
2. Flash
3. sIFR

Custom Images

The most straight-forward solution is to create an image of the text you want. This way you can have complete control over the size and spacing. This is both a good and a bad thing: some people need to increase the font size on their browser to be able to read the copy. When you use an image, you may be limiting the ease of use of your site.

Using images in place of text also means you need to put a new file up on your web server every time something changes. This can be time-consuming if you have a lot of copy to change, and there may be a slight lag on the user’s end while they are waiting for images to be displayed from the server.

Lastly, putting content into an image makes it illegible for machines. You will need to ensure your developer is adding “alt text” (“alternative”) to any images with text in them. This helps users of screen readers as well as search engine spiders to understand the content of your page. It may not be pretty, but it will ensure the content is available for those who aren’t looking at your interface.

Flash

Building a site (or even just a portion of a site) in Flash means you are not limited by what fonts the user has on his system. Flash runs in its own player and all the necessary files (fonts, images, etc) are included within the movie itself. Note there may still be slight differences between a Flash movie made on a Mac and one made on a PC.

The biggest challenge to building in Flash is having a Flash developer create it. A Flash movie can be created with all the assets incorporated directly into the .swf itself, in which case the file itself must be changed and “republished” any time there is a change. Alternatively, a .swf can read from an external data source, so changes made in a database, an XML file or elsewhere can simply drive what’s being displayed in Flash.

Google is steadily getting better at indexing Flash, so there are fewer concerns that your content is being blocked from search engines or users of assistive technology. However, Flash doesn’t run on the iPhone, so you do risk preventing some visitors from accessing your content.

sIFR

Another technique is sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). sIFR replaces text written to the page with a small Flash piece. This overcomes some of the limitations listed above: content is written to the page so it is indexable, and there is no need for a developer to create new Flash pieces when things change.

Making sIFR look good takes some work: generally the text is seen on the page for a moment before it is replaced, so effort must be made to ensure it is not too distracting a ‘swap’.

sIFR was used to get the custom font in the tagline. The first image shows what the site looks like before the Flash loads (or if you had Flash disabled), the second is the desired effect.

The best option?

There is no single best option for using custom fonts, and it’s perfectly okay to mix and match the options. On the People’s Choice Awards site (from which all the examples I’ve displayed were taken), we used all three:

We used images for the navigation. These were unlikely to change frequently. For headers, we used sIFR, and for more interactive pieces we created Flash modules. These read from an external data source so that we could update the content via an admin interface and simply have it displayed within the Flash piece.

So while there are a suite of standard web fonts to use for body copy, there are certainly options for including custom fonts as well. It’s simply a matter of balancing the ease of update and use with the esthetic benefits. Knowing these options and the implications can help with such decisions.

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The inevitable business card exchange occurs at a networking event. You meet Jay Simpson, who tells you he’s an IT director.

IT? What does that even mean anymore?

A few years ago, IT was “Information Technology”.

Information technology is a general term that describes any technology that helps to produce, manipulate, store, communicate, and/or disseminate information.
- from Wikipedia – Information Technology

But more often these days we speak not of Information Technology but of Interactive.

Interactive Marketing refers to the evolving trend in marketing whereby marketing has moved from a transaction-based effort to a conversation…Interactive marketing is not synonymous with online marketing, although interactive marketing processes are facilitated by internet technology.
- from Wikipedia – Interactive Marketing

The astute will notice that the second definition is about marketing and doesn’t explicitly refer to technology at all. The focus is less on the specific technical specifications and moreso on the application thereof. Interactive also encompasses the user experience: how individuals engage with and how they perceive this engagement with technology to achieve their goals.

At the NTEN conference in San Francisco in April 2009, Beth Kanter declared in a session about social media metrics that Page views are dead. We can no longer simply focus on the technological implementation to measure success. We now look at engagement and influence, and need to actually consider how technology helps with meeting user goals, and then organizational objectives.

It is not sufficient to see technology as simply a tool to “produce, manipulate and store” information. While information is obviously important, it is truly the application thereof that is of significance.

(Photo credit: Shapeshift on Flickr)

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Whether or not they’re familiar with the term, most Internet users have encountered a CAPTCHA. The contrived acronym stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” and the most common incarnation is an obscured series of letters and numbers that the site visitor must visually decipher and type in. The idea is that a human may do this, while a sightless bot cannot. However, this also has some obvious challenges with regards to accessibility, and programs are getting increasingly sophisticated and can now crack many of these barriers. So moving beyond simple character recognition, the next generation of CAPTCHA seems to tap more into human cognition and spatial manipulation.

In one of those great examples of an idea whose time is nigh, it appears that about the same time Marcos Boyington and his brother at YUNiTi.com implemented something on their site, blogger Taylor Hayward wrote about such an idea. Poor Michael G. Kaplan actually developed a model for a 3-D CAPTCHA this idea back in 2004 or 2005, but it never caught on. (His page describing the model claims “patents pending” – who knows what specifically he was hoping to patent, and what the status of that is).

The idea behind these recent 3D CAPTCHA designs is that a human can recognize an object and manipulate it spatially in his mind. This is a step beyond character recognition/repetition and involves an additional level of cognition and understanding. In Hayward’s model he specifically mentions the use of animals, as he claims that humans are “currently able to identify animals faster than any computer given a changing selection of images.”

credit: Taylor Hayward

I’ve never been a big fan of CAPTCHAs from an accessibility standpoint, so I won’t belabor the point here. A blind user is not going to be able to use a 3D CAPTCHA. But what of people with dyslexia: will these tests be easier for them? Or are there other conditions that will find this task particularly hard? It’s been several years since my Neuroscience class, but I am not sure that people with difficulties with depth perception or other cognitive difficulties would be able to pass this CAPTCHA. I’ll admit that the second picture on the YUNiTi CAPTCHA event has me stumped: that’s a pen, isn’t it? I don’t see that as an option…

I love the fact that as technology gets more sophisticated, we are compelled to create experiences that are more closely tied into traits and talents that are uniquely human. We are forced to learn more about our own minds, actions and behaviors so as to distinguish ourselves from our creations.

(Original post from CNET: 3D-based Captchas become reality)

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