The emperor's new social strategy

When it comes to social marketing, it seems that small businesses in the UK just don't get it. Despite all the buzz surrounding social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, a recent study by the Forum of Private Business discovered that many SME's are struggling to see any real value in their inclusion in the marketing mix.

According to the survey of 5,800 small to medium-sized businesses in the UK, around 21% of them rated social networking platforms as "not useful", whilst 6% claimed that they were "useless". So is social marketing really just a box of nail-holes, or are UK businesses just doing it wrong?

Live conference streaming debuts on Risky Business 2010

Visitors to the Risky Business conference video website can now register to watch live coverage of talks as they happen.

Three Riff Raff web projects shortlisted for regional design awards

Three of our recent web design and build projects have been shortlisted for regional design awards The SMACS, organised by digital media collective Super Mondays.

Although awarded by a panel of industry judges, the competition has a public vote element, so be sure to cast your votes for our design & build work on...

• PokerStars TV (shortlisted for best B2C website)


• Metropolis Pictures (shortlisted for best B2B website)


• Infinite Edge (also shortlisted for best B2B website)

...at the SMACS Awards website. Pints all round if we land a couple!

Canvas for the masses

Mix Online Labs' AI->Canvas Plugin

Mix Online Labs has released a free cross-platform plugin to export vector and bitmap images from Adobe Illustrator to HTML5's Canvas element, including support for interactivity and animation.

Has the world gone completely mad!??

If it were not incredible enough that companies like BP and LastMinute.com can register a colour as a Trademark, it now appears that interactivity itself has been patented.

The mashup generation

At Riff Raff, we're looking to hire an experienced PHP web developer to join our Newcastle web design team, and we've noticed a pattern emerging amongst this latest generation of developers in our region that we find quite concerning; Very few of them seem to have the capability to build anything from scratch.

The power of social networks

At Riff Raff, we leverage social networks like Facebook and Twitter for our clients all the time, taking advantage of their incredible reach to carry marketing messages and drive huge volumes of traffic, but it's not often that we get around to wielding their immense power for our own objectives.

Web design & development jobs in the North East

We're looking for a PHP Developer, User Experience Designer and Technical Project Manager to join our growing interactive team, designing and developing scalable websites and web applications for a range of clients across the UK, covering everything from bespoke E-commerce and Content Management Solutions to Social Networking and On-demand TV Platforms across desktop, set-top and mobile devices.

Gowalla checkin API for developers

The cupboard-dwelling nerd in me was genuinely excited to read about location-based social networking platform Gowalla making their checkin API available to third party developers using OAuth.

I found this particularly encouraging, since it significantly increases Gowalla's chances of gaining traction in the market, given Facebook's plans to add location-based services to its feature-set a couple of months ago. This is extremely important, if we are to avoid the space being monopolised by a single leviathan platform.

The Role of Social Networks in Buying Decisions

I was a little disappointed when I read about Gartner's report on the impact of social networking on consumer buying decisions. I had hoped for an incredible insight into consumer behaviour that would revolutionise e-commerce as we know it, but it did little more than confirm what Gladwell had already observed in The Tipping Point.

Bad times for Murdoch

Last month, The Times introduced a controversial new "paywall", demanding paid subscription to access its content, losing almost 90% of its online readership in the process, according to the Guardian.

Farewell to WordPress

Well, I finally switched to Tumblr as my blogging platform. WordPress was becoming bloated with features I never used, and is an absolute spam magnet.

I don’t post nearly as often as I’d like, so the last thing I need is a tool that actually makes my life more difficult! Tumblr on the other hand is simple, lightweight, and has a range of cool tools and widgets to extend it if you wish.

Hopefully this will make it easier to voice my thoughts more often!

Update: I only wish they would speed up the dashboard - it's taking an age to open!

Augmented Reality on Bing Maps

Those clever folks at Microsoft have done it again! (no, really)

Yes, that's one 'C' word I never thought I'd use to describe the company who brought us Vista, but whilst leaving the office juniors to plot the next thrilling episode of Internet Explorer, Microsoft have been beavering away on something I find genuinely exciting.

Chris Harrison, Dan Morris and Desney Tan, of Microsoft Research have come up with Skinput, a bio-accoustic sensing technology that allows the human skin to act as an input device.

Still in early prototype, an armband detects the subtle differences in sound frequencies caused when tapping various parts of your body to locate the impact, making it possible to determine which button was pressed. Wireless Bluetooth technology is then used to transmit this data to other devices, such as iPods and mobile phones. Absolute genius!

While Apple makes yesterday's technology palatable for the masses, Microsoft seem to be really pushing the boundaries of HCI with experimental technologies like this, Surface and Project Natal.

As a developer and designer whose career has been blighted by Explorer's buggy, downright anarchic interpretation of my work, I find it almost uncomfortable to say it, but maybe Microsoft is onto something here!

The Paradox of Innovative User Experience

As a User Experience designer, I face an impossible catch-22 on a daily basis. On one hand, I have an obligation to my stockholders and clients to create experiences that actually, genuinely work. Every time I craft a proposal, I commit myself indelibly to the delivery of a piece of work that will generate more revenue, attract more targeted traffic or increase social engagement with a brand.

All of these things are now easily measurable, and UX designers are just as accountable for their design decisions as any conventional architect or engineer. Design is no longer shrouded in mystery. It is no longer a black art, understood only by the sacred few. Everything I do, I do for a reason, and my design decisions are based on a careful balance of knowledge, experience, fact and a little educated assumption.

On the other hand, what makes me attractive to my potential clients is something very different. Most people require effective design in order to deliver a ROI that justifies the risk, but what they desire is something better; something different. Something innovative.

And herein lies the conflict. To design something that consumers can use so easily that it feels natural to them, removing any barriers to conversion or engagement, means engineering something that is inherently easy to use; something intuitive. Jeff Raskin defined the word beautifully in his (still valid) 1994 paper Intuitive Equals Familiar:

"Intuitive [equals] readily transferred, existing skills."

For those who can't be bothered to read the whole paper (and I recommend you make the effort), Raskin defines intuitive as the ability to use an interface without having to learn anything new. Familiarity creates intuition, enabling an end-user to immediately adopt an interface without further research or training. But innovation, by its very definition, demands the creation of something new and experimental. If that's the case, how on Earth do we innovate in intuitive user experience design? How do we create an interface that is both unconventional and familiar, all at the same time?

When put like that, it sounds like an impossible task, and I'm sure there are many UX designers who are happy to hide behind this conflict, as justification for remaining within their comfort zone. But you only have to look at some of the big innovators in technology today to see how this can be achieved.

Until recently, the conventional means of utilising mobile phone software was via a keypad and joystick of some description. This was the case for almost a decade (it may be longer - mobile historians, please correct me) until Apple released the iPhone in 2007, changing the face of interaction design forever. With the iPhone, Apple had created a truly ground-breaking user interface, whilst making it more intuitive than ever before, by rejecting current mobile conventions, and instead mimicking the way we interact with real-life objects.

We naturally prod things, we pinch and squeeze them, and slide them around to reposition. We don't naturally do these things via a proxy, such as a mouse, joystick or keyboard. These input devices are relatively new to our consciousness, and have been adapted-to over a long period of time. Multi-touch technology has allowed us to revert to a more direct interaction with the objects we see on screen, effectively removing technology (psychologically, at least) from the equation altogether, and putting the power back into our fingertips where it belongs.

So what can we learn from the iPhone? The lesson I take from this is that in order to innovate in the field of user experience, without sacrificing effectiveness through lack of intuition, we must first look at how our current understanding of the world has been constructed. Only when we can separate truly intuitive behaviour from acquired constructs, can we begin to design interactive solutions that revolve around what makes us human. And with the almost sci-fi advances in 3D tactile touchscreen and voice recognition technologies over the last few years, we're coming closer than ever to that eutopia.

Universal principles of design

I often come across the assumption that because daily business revolves around a specific medium, one's design expertise is limited only to that discipline. By day, my primary focus is on designing engaging user experiences for the web, but I don't consider myself to be a web designer. In my mind, design is far, far broader than that.

I recently had the opportunity to design an EPG interface for a television set-top box. To me this was an interesting departure from my day to day work in e-commerce, social media and application design; a chance to look at the world from a different perspective.

When the design was complete, the technical director of the project seemed genuinely surprised that I had understood and adapted to the peculiarities of the EPG, and had designed a user interface that was both intuitive and technically correct. Not bad for a web designer.

He'd worked with many web designers in the past who had  attempted to translate their UI design principals to the television screen, and had failed miserably; Delivering a web experience that was neither practical nor technically possible on a television.

The World Wide Web is just one medium that I work with, and I am particularly good at it. But design, for me, is universal. It is about finding a balance between something over which you have no control, and something over which you have no limitation.

On one side you have the immovable truth: The problem, the business objective, the strategy - whatever it happens to be. On the other, you have possibility - a blank canvas. What you put into this space, in order to answer, solve or fulfill the immovable truth, is Design.

Televisions and EPGs have some immovable truths:

• They are generally navigated with a remote control, using directional arrows


• They don't have a cursor


• Anamorphic HD will be squeezed into a Standard Definition screen, losing resolution


• There are 'safe areas' to observe, in order to avoid having your interface cropped


• Televisions don't handle certain colours particularly well

Some might see these as obstacles, but I see them as truths; Neither negative or positive. It's just the way things are, and I have to work around them. I have to design an intuitive and engaging user interface around these truths.

I avoided problematic colours in situations where they might bleed. I used fonts and type-sizes that would shrink gracefully and still be legible when reduced to Standard Definition. I created a grid that respected the 'safe areas' and didn't put anything important close to the edges. I included 'on focus' styling so that the user could see which button they were on, without relying on a mouse-cursor to tell them.

In my world, Design is about solving problems and answering questions. Good Design is about solving problems in new and interesting ways. Great Design is about taking those fundamental principals and applying them to any given problem, regardless of the discipline or medium.

Javascript: A job for designers or developers?

I've come across a number of conflicting opinions when it comes to where Javascript belongs in the website production workflow. Personally, I find working with Javascript both infuriating and rewarding, but is it a developer's job, or is it a design thing?

At first, I thought it was a web developer's responsibility. Afterall, it's a scripting language, right? It involves writing code in order to extend a webpage with some kind of logical intelligence. A web designer, on the other hand uses markup; an instructional language describing the contents of a page to a web browser, with no inherent perception or decision-making capabilities. This seems to make sense, but there is another way of looking at it.

In Defining Web Designer 2.0, I looked at the myriad roles of the new breed of web designer, one of which was that of Interaction Design. As Javascript matures - or should I say the application of Javascript matures - it's becoming more an integral part of an Interaction Designer's usability toolkit. Whether it's providing client-side form validation or visual feedback for a subtle AJAX call, Javascript is very much a part of the User Experience.

Unlike server-side languages such as PHP or Ruby, the quality and application of Javascript code has a direct effect on a user's experience. And I believe it's this subtle qualitative aspect of Javascript that separates it from the rest of a web developer's toolkit.

I know a few designers who would go as white as a sheet, faced with the prospect of owning Javascript development, but I believe that if a designer is to create inspired user experiences, they should have a thorough understanding of the tools at their disposal, and that includes Javascript.

Defining Web Designer 2.0

A few years ago, the emphasis for web designers was on versatility and multi-tasking. Only those who could do everything themselves would survive, but this seems to be rapidly changing as the web matures. We're beginning to realise that the web, and those who live in it are becoming too sophisticated for a single jack-of-all-trades to properly understand.

Some might attribute this to a post-bubble downsizing, as regional web agencies shrank along with their budgets in the nineties, leaving an entire generation of freelancers fending for themselves. The broadcast television industry had suffered a similar blow a decade earlier, when the arrival of digital TV tipped the budget-to-airtime ratio and studios shut down over night.

The ability to single-handedly carry a web project through from concept to launch was essential to survival for the late nineties web professional, which gave designers like myself a significant advantage later in life. But no agencies meant no strategy, which triggered a torrent of ill-informed web monstrosities, conceptualised by zealous entrepreneurs and marketing directors with no understanding of the medium.

These days, our business is very different. The sector is healthy again, despite recent economical difficulties, and the agencies are enjoying something of a renaissance. Our understanding of the web, and more importantly, those who engage with it is growing all the time. The term 'design' is beginning to take on meanings that were previously overlooked, or misunderstood. These are exciting times.

So what is the modern definition of a web designer? There may be many more, but at Riff Raff, we see design as a combination of the following disciplines in mixed measures:

• Information Architecture


• User Experience Design


• Interaction Design


• Brand Design


• Graphic Design


• Presentation Layer Development (HTML/CSS)


• Javascript Development

I'm not going to go into great depth about what each of these roles involve; They should be fairly self-explanatory. The question I am forced to ask as I recruit new designers to join our band of Riff Raff is: Where can I find the super-human capable of all of the above? Does this person exist?

If so, let me know. I've got a corner office and reserved parking space with their name on it! careers@studioriffraff.com