Image: Flickr user TheGiantVermin

Are you designing a promotion experience or a product experience?

App-vertising is emerging as a means for brands to engage with consumers through downloadable mobile apps. Marketing and advertising professionals herald the growing app trend as a more sure entrance into the elusive mobile landscape. The fragmented mobile device and mobile OS landscape confined marketing to the lowest common denominators: which meant WAP sites and SMS campaigns.

That landscape has shifted significantly and is primed for brands to connect more deeply with consumers. Four key reasons the opportunity is real:

1. Smart phones are capable of delivering rich applications (not just games and wallpapers);
2. A critical mass of mainstream consumers now have smart devices in hand;
3. Users have a voracious appetite for app downloads (and not just for iPhone, Android, Palm, Nokia all have app stores in play)
4. Brands can stand alone in app stores and are no longer constrained by carrier’s walled gardens

Yet, slow down a little before throwing your budget at an iPhone app. I’d like to offer insights on the approach that will make the difference between mobile experiences that get adopted – and therefore extend brands – versus those that provide merely a flash in the pan.
Continue Reading »

Add this to digg, del.icio.us, etc.

A Call for more sensitivity to hierarchy, space, and scale in user interface design.

Typographers have been organizing complex sets of information for hundreds of years. In that process they rarely rely on boxes to convey hierarchy and organization. Why do interface designers feel a need to draw a box around every element in a user interface? What is it about nested boxes, even three or four levels deep, on one screen? In this article I hope to lay out some basic tools perfected by typographers, that apply to interface design.

Continue Reading »

Add this to digg, del.icio.us, etc.