Cullmann Design Blog

I really like QR Codes

What do you do if you want to have someone respond “on-the-go” who doesn’t have a smartphone? Enter Zoove. Zoove is service that makes short-code call-to-action easy. Their service allows your customers (or users) to send an SMS text that is between 2 and 12 characters prefaced by “**” and get an automated response containing a URL, coupon, mobile application, video, etc,.

What does Zoove really give you? I’m exposed to a very wide variety of customer types and use cases in my professional career. There are a lot of instances where QR Codes just are not a good fit for a particular audience. In those cases, Zoove offers a very low barrier to entry and a very nice way to introduce new markets to immediate response options like real-time coupons, instant discounts and providing video or other easy-to-understand product information. With 72% of the U.S. cell phone market texting, there is a huge opportunity for utilizing the solution that Zoove is offering with short-code messaging.

What could go wrong? Zoove, and other short-code solutions, do have a barrier to entry for end-users: Giving up their cell phone numbers. Unlike QR Codes which do not require that users share any information, texting a brand, gives the perception for the user that they are giving up their private cell phone number. The perception is a big factor. Despite the fact that responsible marketers like Zoove, provide controls for users, users are not very keen on making their personal information available to marketers.

Take aways: QR Codes are still a great way to reach mobile users–especially with smart phone sales taking a market majority in the US. If you are marketing to an audience who is not likely to own a device that can make use of a quick response code, Zoove, as well as services like JagTag and SnapTag are a very good alternative with excellent offerings for advertisers and marketers.

VISA is planning the roll-out of this new offering as the beginning of a larger E-Wallet offering that will modernize credit transactions for the public. Having the solution based in a MicroSD form factor should allow it to be widespread on a wide variety of mobile devices. A more focused release is rumored with participation by Apple for it’s yet-to-be confirmed iPhone 5 release.

In addition to be able to leave your plastic at home, VISA’s new offering presents additional security options with real-time confirmation for transactions, direct-association with asset management software and real-time billing, balance and credit-line information.

The current iteration of the credit card is due for an overhaul for the security of card holders, the management of what has become and almost completely virtual commerce model and the ability for financial institutions to track customer behavior for safety and improved protection.

The application acts as a gift card and is required to be attached to either a pre-paid Starbucks gift card or a credit card. When prompted, the user simply clicks a payment prompt in the application and presents the rendered bar code for scanning. A very simple and smart solution.

So why all of the fuss? Because the US has been lagging behind in the adoption of mobile payments and micro-payments. Both Asia and Northern Europe have been making use of this technology since the mid-2000’s for the purchase of municipal services (buses, trains, parking), books, magazines, cigarettes and fast-food. Imagine swiping your mobile phone over the parking meter while on an errand or using your phone as a replacement for your MetroCard?

Beyond the frivolity of the Starbucks applications (which is actually quite handy), this is an excellent case study for the American public to begin a relationship with mobile payments. The audience is right-people who tend to be oriented towards new and somewhat trendy things-and the pace of a coffee shop is just right to work the kinks out of scanning and the somewhat pavlovian response of standing a retail register with your wallet out. The sales of smart phones are projected to overtake feature phones this year. All of these devices can act as envoys for those documents that we never seem to have convenient: club cards, membership programs, spare keys. The devices that we are never without are the ideal housing for these pieces of our lives.

The adoption of mobile devices as a currency will likely be slow. There is little need for the replacement of our current system, but rather as a supplement to help us avoid some of the less convenient aspects of our monetary system. For all of those small-payments that require coins that we seldom have enough of and the situations that need a fast transaction, your phone will be the E-ZPass of your pedestrian life.

There are pitfalls to be aware of: viruses, security, loss of your devices that has so much personal and financial information, but like the widespread use of credit cards, these will all become a manageable hurdle to overcome for ease-of-use.

If you like coffee and have one of these devices, give it a try and see how future commerce feels.

Fragmentation and Specialization

Desktop, Mobile, Touch, 10-foot… The market is becoming flush with many new gadgets and technology. From Internet-TV to SmartPhones, everything is accessing data from as wide a variety of sources and with as wide a variety of design challenges. After many recent advances in HTML standards the desktop browser market is maturing with support for controlled presentation of text, graphics and interactive media. Some of that is changing thanks to the fragmentation of media by several consumption changes that are growing in 2011.

Enter the growing mobile market. Within the next 5 years, it is expected that the consumption of content will more likely take place on a mobile device than a desktop or laptop. This challenge is being met be designers right now. Although smaller resolution device present some hurdles for designers, advances in mobile browsers have made adaption intuitive.

Add now, the tablet market. With Apple’s iPad the leader, Adobe’s Flash plug-in has become the pariah of the internet development community. Although a strong technology with incredible market saturation it is suffering from a bad rap. Regardless, there is a move to HTML5 and JavaScript technologies for video delivery. There is also a move back to a more conservative 1024 X 768 browser resolution for usability. All of these changes influenced by personal, less-powerful mobile browsing and media consumption platforms.

Internet TV consoles are going to be big players in the consumer space this year. Devices that can search the web for video and audio content and deliver it to your living room with the ease of a Google search. Google, Apple, Boxee and Roku are all contenters in this space and the winners will take a huge portion of our couch-time. To designers: Your media should be streamlined for the consumption in short-burst from a couch-born viewer. This user interface, the 10-foot interface is presented by the device. By most specs (Google, Boxee and Roku) your presentation is stripped and data held on the page presented by proxy for the waiting viewer.

HTML5

HTML5 will spread its wings in 2011. Coming on strong in 2010, HTML5 has seen a respectable uptake. The ability for developers to deploy HTML5 classes and methods and still have the ability to support older browsers like Internet Explorer 6 presents a lot of flexibility. This, combined with the search benefits of HTML5 content hierarchy makes it a logical choice for anyone developing a new website.

2011 will bring a new crop of devices that access the internet. Almost all will provide support for the HTML5 spec and all will support a transitional specification. Apple’s iOS devices for example have been able to supply strong video support and overcome the incompatibility with Adobe’s Flash only because of HTML5’s media ability.

HTML5’s rise will also come at the cost of aging corporate hardware. Enterprise, making up a majority of the IE6 instances still in the wild, will be forced to abandon older Windows hardware still in the workforce. Facilitated by the stability and warm reception on Windows7 and also a waining support for WindowsXP by Microsoft, new hardware introduced into the field will have better software support for HTML5. The introduction of a new browser, IE9, will mark an official entry into modern browsing by Microsoft.

Fonts

A maturing web is becoming a beautiful place. Once the bastion of print-designers, unique fonts are now becoming a coming commonplace for web designers. This past year, independent developers, font-houses and design-collective began widespread use of tools that can embed, stream and deliver to the end-user fonts for use in rendering webpages.

These new technologies employ several methods and tactics with as wide a range of executions. They all promise to deliver platform agnostic typographic freedom from the somewhat stale, though reliable, suite of fonts that have been used to build every webpage in the last 15 years.

TypeKit, FontSquirel and Google are a few of the leaders in this space. All provide transparent fall-backs for developers in the event that a solution is not supported of there is a technology failure. This combined with commonplace broadband to feed the solution to end users presents an new playground for designer, developers and content owners.

The effect is fantastic: unique designs, once only executed by embedding images, is done by feeding a temporary file for font rendering. It is lightweight for the end-user and allows the site to be accessible to all devices (with and without font support). The palette of fonts is growing everyday and the devices supporting custom fonts is growing as well.

Although every operating system interprets and presents fonts in its own way, the essence of custom fonts gives designers the ability to express themselves and their brands in a whole new way never before available to their visitors.

Giving Up On The Fold

There is no fold. I had never been especially concerned about the fold. I’ve worked on many projects where the discussion of “the fold” led to some seriously compromised designs. The argument about the fold is typically transference for too many or not properly designed call-to-action items. A well designed page (with strong content) should have a user scanning the page, clicking deeper or committing (or not) to reading the content and scrolling the page until they consume all that they want, or need to.

The growth of the mobile market, the emergence of tablets (representing a return to the 1024 x 768 standard) and the popularity of add-ons and toolbars, the fold leaves designers with solutions that look more like a print-spread than a dynamic web page. Most users are visiting websites with a distinct intention. Determining that intention and making that actionable is much more important to the designer than proving a multitude of visible destinations to the user.

If you are fortunate enough to design or create content for a website that has a large percentage of browsing users, or are driving traffic to the homepage on a product website, you should be directing users to several key destinations. By offering users too many options from the homepage, you may end up overwhelming or confusing them. Focusing calls-to-action is also a way to capture information about your audience. If you are able to segment them to key areas, you can better address their individual needs with more niche links and actionable items within the site.

Listening For What Works

No matter what trends emerge for 2011, you should take the new year as an opportunity to look at your analytics. Google’s solution is free and provide in-depth reporting on your users, your content and also offers A-B testing so you can determine how your designs are effecting user behavior and traffic.