Annoying Design

Sep

My New Gig At Modernista!

By ross 3 Comments

Categories: agencies and career

Last week I started a new job as Lead Experience Designer for Boston-based ad agency Modernista!

I’m their first full-time user experience hire, and charged with helping the agency, which is often recognized for brilliant traditional work, develop their interactive capabilities.

Designing Web sites and digital offerings is fundamentally different from creating a TV spot. So it’s going to certainly be a challenge to get a whole agency to shift their mentality and processes. But one I’m really excited by. Because in a lot of ways, this job is a culmination of all the things I’ve done before.

I’m going to rely heavily on the business strategy and user experience expertise I developed while working at Forrester for the past two years. Advising clients can sometimes be the biggest challenge, especially when you need to shift their thinking.

But I’m also going to pull a lot from what I learned working on Guitar Hero at Harmonix, and PeaceMaker at CMU. Those two jobs showed me what it means to work in on lean, mean, digital projects, and get things done with few resources.

I miss the people I met at Forrester. Especially Bruce Temkin who was my boss and mentor, and helped me carve out an area of expertise helping clients understand young consumers and design for them.

But I’m gung-ho about Modernista! Any agency with an exclamation point in their name has my heart, as I posted about a while back. Their awesome creativity stirs my soul. I hope I can change their minds though, that creativity isn’t king anymore. The user is.

Aug

Nike Takes The “Social” Out Of User Communities

By ross 2 Comments

Categories: brands and social networks

As an active runner who owns a Nike+iPod Sports Kit, I find their upcoming million person race a little strange.

Here’s some more backstory:

Nike is gearing up for The Human Race 10k on August 31st, where 1 million+ runners will don their iPods to race in 25+ locations around the world at the same time. The race is designed to highlight the Nike+ product line, which tracks and communicates your pace while you run, and allows you to upload it to compare your results to others. Strangers linked together through iPods yet running side by side…certainly an epitome of the information age!

By leveraging a synergistic brand partnership built on simple but inventive technology, Nike and agency R/GA created the Sports Kit, and did an amazing job at selling more shoes. And they created a user community of runners around the globe who compete as they record their running progress on their iPods.

But the Sports Kit site is an awesome missed opportunity to make this user community an addictive, dedicated fan base. Because when you log on to the site to track your progress, you very rarely have any interaction with other people. Certainly not in the rich way you do on MySpace, where you can comment, share, and message other people. On Nike’s community, you can really only post, or use standard forums.

Back to the million-person race. The way they’re organizing this event is strange because your options are to either:

run alone with your iPod (just like any other day)
run in designated city race for $35.

These both seem like pretty mediocre options to me and fellow runners, like Scott who says:

I’m bummed that there isn’t a Human Race nearby, for I would like to witness it. If anything just to see thousands of runners screaming “ON YOUR LEFT!” to no avail. The blissfully deaf iPod runners are a nightmare in most road races…imagine everyone having one going at full blast! There is definitely going to be some carnage.

What if instead, Nike took an idea from basic street teams and viral marketing. And Nike created event t-shirts people could by for cheap before the race day. Then Nike even made a custom Google Maps mashup that let racers organize running groups in their hometowns.

Just imagine how people would react seeing groups of runners across the country racing together with the same t-shirts. They’ll get the word out. A simple mashup that helps enthusiasts organize around a brand rally call is a lot more inspiring than charging them $35 for the privilege to participate.

Anyone know why they’re doing things this way, instead of getting more social?

Aug

How Do You Market Meaning?

By ross 0 Comments

Categories: advertising and marketing

Why is so much advertising creative driven by comedy, rather than tragedy? Is it because agencies want to associate their clients’ brands with positive messaging? Or maybe funny is easier to craft than sad?

Whatever the case, from the first Got Milk TV spot, to today’s web-native masterpieces like Subservient Chicken, advertising in recent years is most often driven by comedy. But what of the whole notion of “sadvertising” — ad creative that’s built on drama, rather than kitschy tongue and cheek?

I had the pleasure of talking with Gary Koepke the other day. He’s one of the founders of Modernista!, the independent Boston-based agency with clients like (PRODUCT)RED. And he asked if there’s a way to inspire young people through advertising. To make them feel more than just slight discomfort when a homeless man asks for lose change on a street corner. Or to persuade them to see more than just statistics when they hear that 15,000 people die from AIDS every day in Africa.

strangerthanfiction

Have you seen the movie Stranger Than Fiction with Will Ferrell yet? Because it’s an incredible look at the subtle difference between tragedy and comedy. Ferrell is an absolute comedic ninja in movies like Old School. And yet his acting style works in a film playing an IRS auditor who knows he’s about to die. The film explores this notion that the character’s eminent demise brings meaning to his life. He stops living a drab existence, and falls in love.

The movie asks what lots of people have: why are all the “great” works of literature stories where people die at the end? Which is similar to what I’m asking now: why has almost all great advertising been driven by comedy?

If gutsy agencies like Modernista! are going to take the challenge of marketing meaning - of motivating a whole generation to fight for a cause — the norm of witty, socially hip ad creative might not fly. Because these issues reside in soulful place, and the creative needs to speak to that.

Aug

Building a UX Team of One

By ross 0 Comments

Categories: agencies and usability

It’s been a long blogging hiatus. I’ve been taking time to work on my job search and figure out what I’m most passionate about), But now I’ve started working on a big blog post titled “Developing Experience Design Within The Traditional Agency.”

My hypothesis is that as consumer distrust and distaste of advertising increases, they’ll respond only to experiences, not messaging. And as their attention moves to digital channels, the top agencies of tomorrow will be those who design cross-channel experiences, rather than campaigns with digital add-ons. But to do that, agencies need to build strong expertise in user experience and design strategy, and integrate their planning/insights with creative.

In my research for this upcoming post I came across Leah Buley’s preso “How to be a UX Team Of One.” Awesome visual preso design, and chock full of really great ideas about building UX understanding from the ground up. Some of my favorite nuggets of insight:

Host open design sessions
Business needs + User needs = Design Principals
Make sketchboards and build a library of design ideas

Jul

Should Web Agencies Sponsor Olympic Hopefuls?

By ross 1 Comment

Categories: advertising and marketing and website design

In April I wrote a post called Digital Agency Sites Suck — pretty self explanatory title — and it’s become my most-read post. I think that’s because it supports what most people feel — many agency websites are flashy, digital masturbation — not the unique, storytelling-driven expressions they should be.

But here’s an interesting attempt I read about on Ad Freak: Kolar Advertising found a real-life story that encapsulates their world-view, and what they, as an agency, believe in.

As a runner, Paul Stoneham endures grueling training in hopes of qualifying for the Olympic 10k. But the odds are against him — he’s 37 — a classic underdog tale, up there with George Foreman’s comeback fight.

So Kolar Advertising — who sees themselves as an underdog — decided to sponsor Paul, the runner. For no other reason than his story (his brand) inspires their brand.

KolarRunning

But this screenshot you see is only linked to from a tiny link at the bottom of their site — with the vague label “Heroes.”

Kolar, if you read this, consider taking some major real-estate of your very “flashy” intro-heavy homepage, to promote this sponsorship. It’s a gutsy, unique move, that says a lot about what you stand for. And that’s exactly what an agency home page should be about.

Agencies need to realize that everyone makes pretty web sites these days. That’s not going to win AoR relationships — that’s just your entry form to the competition. I bet clients really want to know: What about you as an agency, your culture, your processes, your world view, makes you different form everyone else?

I’m going to take this advice to heart, and redo my own website, and portfolio to tell the story of my culture and process. We all have one.

So what do you think about this sponsorship? Does it make any sense for a full-service ad agency to sponsor an Olympic hopeful? Is this just a PR stunt? Or does this really add something to how Kolar presents themselves?

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About Me

Hi, my name is Ross and I’m a design strategist, passionate about studying how audiences connect with products and ideas. I'm a lead experience designer at Modernista!. And I've worn many hats: a market researcher and consultant at Forrester Research, a game designer at Harmonix, a grad student at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, a composer and teacher at New England Conservatory. You can reach me at ross.spw@gmail.com, or follow me on twitter.