Howells.

Today I met Keenan Cummings, co-founder and creative director of new location app Wander.

With location-oriented startups popping up every week, it’s easy to dismiss them as very me too, but I like two aspects that set Wander apart:

With Wander, you create and curate a location journal – not simply a list of places.

With Foursquare and such apps, checking into a location is like flippantly tossing a pebble in a bucket. You don’t necessarily care about the act of checking in. And nobody actually cares about your check-ins either, because they’re, well… boring. Instead, Wander offers its users beautifully designed, theme-able journals, reminiscent of Tumblr which allows you to log comments/opinions/memories (short, or long-form). The layout and design of the site is such that you will want to take care to carefully curate and add content to your journals; plural because you can create as many journals as appropriate (per city, for instance).

The delineation between am there, been there, want to go there.

Unlike Foursquare, you don’t need to be in a particular location to post it if you don’t want to. You could create your own thematic guides from your desktop for instance, and answers a lot of the questions I raised in my recent post about location apps. Keenan also mentioned an interesting use case: he has visited Stockholm just once, but loves the city and creates posts in his journal, curating his memory of the city.

Designing, and educating, user behaviours from the outset.

Wander identifies a location using asterisks. So if I were to post a location: “I’m at No Fun in L.E.S.”, the system will parse the string and identify that No Fun is a specific location, and create a link to its entry in its data store. This is an unusual interaction, but Wander plan to educate users about how to use it way up-front so the early adopters hit the ground running. It’s this careful approach to launch that I think will pay huge dividends as the app grows in popularity.

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Today I met Carter Cleveland, the CEO of New York-based start-up Art.sy. At it’s core, Art.sy helps you browse and discover your taste in art, and if you are so inclined to buy it will connect you with the galleries that showcase the pieces.

To me, Art.sy is important for three things.

Firstly, it is one of the most beautiful web interfaces I have seen in recent times: dramatic in its black and white simplicity and careful typography, complemented with slick functionality that makes the site incredibly sticky. It’s a triumph of design and front-end development, such that unlike any other art site you can easily find yourself falling into a rabbit hole of beautiful content. You can jump effortlessly from a Dutch master to a hyper-contemporary sculpture, all tied together with a powerful taxonomy they term The Art Genome Project:

…an ongoing study of the characteristics that distinguish and connect works of art. Art.sy evaluates artworks across 800+ characteristics (we call them genes)—such as art-historical movements, subject matter, and formal qualities—to create a powerful search experience that reflects the multifaceted aspects of works of art.

Secondly, with stunning high definition artwork (supplied by their gallery partners) the site becomes an extension of the gallery experience. On a large screen, the images are huge, with a zoomable interface that allows you to explore a piece’s texture and detail. (And incidentally, the copyright protection that obviously is required for such a site is ingenious.) A particularly nice feature is being able to see a piece in context, hanging on a wall in a gallery. It sounds like a skeuomorphic novelty, but feels great and relevant. This also means Art.sy becomes an important educational tool; a perfect encyclopaedia for the arts.

Thirdly, you are able to curate your own taste. The social layer of Art.sy is in development, but from the initial wireframes that Carter showed me this is an exciting execution of the idea I posted recently. Your own profile can sit alongside well known individuals profiles: imagine jumping from Sofia Copolla’s curated collection to that of your friends. It’s a powerful discovery tool.

Finally, Art.sy will rip open the art industry. To outsiders the art scene is a closed circle composed of the privileged few. And to insiders, it’s all about playing political games with gallery owners. Art.sy will cut through this leaving traditional auction houses and galleries resisting engagement with the web to suffer. I like to imagine the site will inspire a whole new generation potential art buyers, previously shut out from the system.

Importantly Art.sy has a robust and obvious business plan. As well as taking a haircut from each referred transaction, they provide services to gallery owners who can manage their own inventory, and once payment processing systems are in place on the site, the model becomes even more clear. The benefits are not constrained to gallery owners: I’d like to see how an art advisor might leverage the site to help their clients.

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I’m not going to link to the dreadful article, or even mention the writer’s name. I think everyone in the industry knows what I’m talking about.

.net magazine wrote a robust article pinpointing precisely what was wrong with the article. Daniel Gray’s and my own few pennies’ worth were quoted in it.

What I would say though is almost more than the article itself, I’m disgusted that The Guardian/The Observer gave the writer a platform for writing such dreadful nonsense. I do love The Guardian with their technologically savvy approach to journalism and is a refreshing destination for non-gutter tech coverage, which makes me particularly disappointed with this sorry episode.

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I randomly discovered this excellent Slideshare deck by interface designer Johan Ronsse. It contains some wonderful nuggets we should always bear in mind when creating interfaces:

• The power of good defaults — make sure your users have access to the most obvious options first (a good example is optgroup’ing the most likely/popular countries in a massive country select)
• The only benefit of customising a select is making it fit with your design: you lose all the very useful, native functionality a select provides
• If you don’t have the time or skill to customise UI controls (which is hard), it’s best to stick to the boring defaults that work
• (But at the same time if nobody took any risks, there’d be no UI innovation)
• Always leave that little annoying “View larger Map” link in when you embed a Google Map. Otherwise it’s a nightmare – especially on a mobile device – to see the map in full view.
• Alternatively, just embed a static map and link to Google Maps. Nobody uses the embedded map functionality anyway.
• Use outlines, subtly, referring to Google Maps place names, which have white outlines, and the left and right arrows of Facebook’s photo viewer. Your controls should always be visible regardless of their background
• If you use lightboxes to view images, make sure the image occupies the whole screen, and don’t use animated transitions (I’m very guilty of this myself…)

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I enjoyed Al Monk’s reaction to Apple’s announcement of OS X Mountain Lion:

For those of a discerning nature, these things might not please your minimal tastes, but they help the vast majority of users understand, and as we’ve already established, this is who Apple want to please, not us on the fringes.

…

If Apple could have slapped on linen textures, shadows and 3D buttons on Mac OS 1, they definitely would have done. We need not be afraid.

I follow a lot of designers on Twitter, and I hate having to endure the whinging and complaining that goes on with every revision of OS X or iOS. I always bite my lip and choose never to engage in the conversation because it’s boring, and very unimportant.

Al touches on some great points in his article. Mac OS was not made exclusively for a creative production audience. It’s made for anybody.

And the easiest way to engage a mass audience is through proxy or cliché, which is why – even though we might not like it – skeuomorphism is the correct design approach for Apple to take if it is to engage a massive new audience, many of whom may have never touched a computer (my mother, case in point, who uses her iPad daily without any sort of lesson since day one). As I’d hope creative audiences would appreciate, good design cares for the end user, whereas design for designers is usually unsuccessful.

But we needn’t worry for much longer. The hyper realistic calculator – for instance – is a reference to an object that I’d bet won’t be with us for much long (in fact, I can’t remember the last one I have seen one, other than as a relic in a Dieter Rams exhibition). Once a new generation of users comes on board (which is just a few years hence), the proxies that Apple’s designers are using will no longer be valid. Instead, interfaces and patterns that were born in the touch era (such as Clear’s) will soon become the norm. Leather textures and torn edges will disappear with it as a natural, organic progression.

So bear with Apple for a little longer. They’ll reach a skeumorphic peak soon, and tend towards a new interface design paradigm that most of us probably can’t imagine.

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I just found this article on Fast Company about Foursquare’s new Explore functionality, which lets you discover places in a given area that you may be in the near future:

…Foursquare has created an elegant solution to the problem of searching not just for things around where you are now, but also the area where you will be. If you’re making plans on the move, the latter is arguably far more important.

This neatly captures my problem with location-based services and apps. I very rarely (if ever) use an app or service to decide on a place to go right now: the reason I’m in a particular place is because I have planned to be there in advance, usually having researched places on my desktop machine, or after referring back to a note of a place I have been recommended.

So Foursquare now allows you to explore places to visit in advance by pinpointing an area that you will be in the near future.

This is great news… kind of.

My problem is now a bit more fundamental. Hardly anyone I know uses Foursquare rigorously enough for the checkin information to be valuable. The gaming nature of the app means that the most active users check into every conceivable place they can find in their database (“oh, so you’re in Starbucks…?”), diminishing the value of the data with every check-in.

Also, the nuance of what a check-in really means is missing. I’ve seen a great many check-ins associated by a negative review: a place to be avoided. Yet if enough people check-in to criticise a venue it will just be viewed as a popular place. Thus the data becomes meaningless.

What I’d like to see now is the perfect recommendation app: simply a small series of carefully recommended places (by people I know and/or trust) that you can choose, and plan to visit later rather than right now. I’m hoping to do this to some extent with The Gourmand, and The City Agenda.

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Now at its seventh issue, So & So is a lovely project by Al Monk, a web designer and developer (and good pal, so I’m biased). Each issue takes a piece of quality writing of a wildly leftfield topic, and is carefully crafted into a single-serving piece of illustrated editorial for the internet to enjoy.

I’d love to see more of these projects: taking “wandering interneteering” from the quick blog post (best typified by the wonderful Jason Kotte), to longer-form pieces of content.

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I enjoyed this article by Chris Tacket in The Atlantic, which asks whether Pinterest and Svpply might in fact reduce consumption:

…counterintuitively, my experience with these services is that they actually help me cut my consumption and to direct my money at goods that more closely align with my values.

The crux of his argument is that adding a product to your profile is sufficient to kick in the endorphins:

…I have found that adding items to my Svpply page gives me a similarly pleasant rush of some pleasure-inducing chemicals

I agree with the sentiment, but for a much more simple reason that he doesn’t seem to touch on.

Fashion relies on consumers buying products as a proxy to convey an individual sense of style or taste to the outside world. But with services like Svpply and Pinterest, why would a consumer bother buying a physical product when they can simply project their taste to a vast audience at zero cost?

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This is an interesting essay by Paul Graham, particularly since it was published in 2008.

In the best part of 4 years, almost all of the 30 ideas he proposes have barely been exploited fully, nor any of the problems it raises have been solved.

It just goes to show there is still an enormous world of opportunities to be explored by technology and design.

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Someone described this article in the NYT as being inspired by an episode of Portlandia, but it’s an interesting thought nonetheless.

Giant e-commerce companies like Amazon are acting increasingly like their big-box brethren as they extinguish small competitors with discounted prices, free shipping and easy-to-use apps. Big online retailers had a 19 percent jump in revenue over the holidays versus 2010, while at smaller online retailers growth was just 7 percent.

The little sites are fighting back with some tactics of their own, like preventing price comparisons or offering freebies that an anonymous large site can’t. And in a new twist, they are also exploiting the sympathies of shoppers like Dr. Pollack by encouraging customers to think of them as the digital version of a mom-and-pop shop facing off against Walmart: If you can’t shop close to home, at least shop small.

“Folks are exercising their desire to support local stores where local is not just in their town, but anywhere in the country,” said Michael Walden, a professor who studies regional economics at North Carolina State University. “A large number of Americans have a general suspicion of bigness in the economic world — they equate bigness with power, monopoly.”

I can’t recall having ever bought anything from a “mom and pop” e-commerce site. If I have, I can’t remember, so didn’t make a significant lasting impression. I automatically resort to Amazon for any consumable, hardware, or book, since my experience with them is 100% satisfactory: I can barely fault a single aspect of their offering. It’s mainly because Amazon is far cheaper, and the online experience is smart. Smaller e-commerce players’ sites I’ve considered using are generally poor and rarely inspire confidence.

But it’s worth thinking about. What makes me venture that little further and spend more money at the lovingly designed Nordic Bakery, when I could easily get a coffee cheaper and more of it at the closest Starbucks, for instance? Sure, the coffee is better at Nordic Bakery, but I’m not really that much of a coffee guy: to me a coffee is a coffee when I want a coffee and have time to kill. (Sorry Lawrence.)

Maybe it’s the shiver of smugness at being at what is essentially a hipster enclave that appeals. Maybe there, the token “oh look at me” Foursquare/Twitter check-in is worth the premium you have to pay.

Okay, so coffee might not be a great example given we’re dealing with discrete consumer products here. But since this blog is a “using Apple as a case study for absolutely everything”-free blog, I can’t think of any examples.

Regardless, I’m struggling to think of any examples where buying a product feels better and more valuable at an independent – rather than “big box” – online retailer. How do you translate a carefully considered, small company retail experience online for quite pedestrian products, and has anyone succeeded in doing it?

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