If we ignore accessibility, we’re a thunderstorm away from living like cavemen or at least from flushing the toilet
Fail One: Waving at Ghosts in the Public Restroom
I am a huge fan of automation and personal hygiene, so the fairly recent adoption of hands free toilets and sinks at just about every public restroom I frequent has raised my quality of life tenfold. Where the toilets succeed and a majority of the sinks fail is in their ability (or lack of) to manually override the automation. I have found myself waving furiously at the little red sensor on an automated sink more times than I can count while a simple push of a button can override the most insensitive of toilet sensors. Since accessibility and user experience should be the top priority in any design, how does this get past the prototyping and testing phases and how does it make it to market on such a wide scale? Maybe the better question is, who is going to fix it?
Fail Two: A Small Experience in a Big World
What motivated me to dig in to this subject was a similarly bad experience I recently had that could have been avoided if just for some simple real-world usability testing. I won’t name name’s but as I was attempting to set up an online account for my new in-shoe sensor so that a major athletic brand can track and make available all my running data, I found myself redirected to the mobile version of their website. Alone, this is completely acceptable; I am running a beta version of Firefox and I’m sure they just haven’t updated their sniffers to catch it yet. What isn’t acceptable is there is no way for me to manually navigate to the full desktop version of the site; no way for me to manually flush! With the overwhelming number of mobile devices, browsers and user agents as well as their desktop counterparts, having no way to manually set preferences on your mobile or desktop site will lead to bad user experiences at best and an unusable website at worst.
As I sit at my desk like some sort of caveman, manually typing on a full keyboard, using a mouse and navigating through multiple applications on dual monitors, all I ask is for a big, shiny, hypnotizing, robust and image-packed user experience. When I’m back out in the real world, surfing the web while driving or crossing the street, I’ll take the mobile version. But in any case, if things don’t work out and your sniffer doesn’t work as it should, give me the option of turning off the autopilot and making the choice myself. Give me a handle to flush.
If you are viewing this on a newer MacBook Pro, click on the logo below to induce vomiting!
Ever since I first heard about how Firefox was going to incorporate accelerometer functionality to their 3.6 release, I’ve been wanting to test it out for myself. I borrowed some code from Paul Rouget to create this nauseating example. There were a lot of comments early on about why add this functionality to a desktop browser. It seemed clear to me that this would give a huge advantage to Firefox once accelerometers were the norm in tablets since it appears they will be first to market. Now, with Apple’s rumored pending announcement of their tablet (the iSlate?) it looks like a win for Firefox. I can see SaaS apps, games, and photo sharing sites being some early adopters.
You’ll need the beta of Firefox 3.6 to see the below example in action. Get it here: Firefox 3.6b5
If you have a MacBook Pro and Firefox 3.6 beta, click on the image above to start the madness. Refresh your browser to make it stop.
Online marketing and communications aren’t what they used to be. By that, I mean yesterday or the day before. Technology and innovation are advancing at a fevered pace and marketing communication is being rebuilt on a foundation of trust – whether we’re on board or not.
The rules of online social interaction have spilled over from our personal lives to define the new economy of trust in marketing and advertising. To reinforce this point, ABI Research reports that 78% of consumers polled trust peer recommendations as opposed to 14% who trust advertisements.
Knowing this, we have to embrace the social media model of opt-in, trust based interactions and drop the hard-sell. If we don’t, we take the risk of quickly becoming irrelevant. We can’t follow our old path of email marketing barely within the constraints of the CAN SPAM Act of 2003. What CAN SPAM was created to enforce is being trumped by the masses who pick and choose what and who they hear, ignoring the rest. CAN SPAM will be rendered moot when email becomes consumers least relevant tool in their arsenal of communication options. Social networking and mobile are the present and the future. We’ve been saying it for years but the coup is coming faster than even the most evangelical of us could have imagined.
ABI Research predicts that, utilizing technology, consumers will be 55 times more mobile in 2014 than they were in 2008. In one year, overall mobile web visits increased by 34%, Social Media sites overtook porn as the #1 destination on the web and Twitter alone grew 1,382%.
How can your organization move toward trust marketing and trust servicing and away from the push and pull of traditional efforts? How can your organization evolve to accommodate for the immanent influx of mobile consumers who will expect a mobile experience from you? Email will not go away any time soon, your website is just as important as ever (even more), and Facebook and Twitter won’t be the last, or the best option, in future years. Innovate with what is available and get your feet wet if you haven’t already. Don’t plan away 2010, do it!
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