Keep your eye open for a fresh new Limina design hitting the streets this evening. OptionIt allows it’s members to reserve their spot at any of their partners’ events at a fraction of the cost. New site should be live tonight: OptionIt.com
We’ve been tracking this story for about a week now – trying to see where things would end up. Here’s just a brief overview an analysis, along with some interesting links on what you might have missed.
On October 5th, 2010 – GAP, inc. quietly swapped out their logo on their website (soft launch) without warning or announcement.
On October 6th, 2010 - UnderConsideration posted an article “Don’t Mind the Gap, or the Square” where they provided a little background on the company, the history of the logo and some initial reactions to the new logo.
Gap’s Facebook Page starts getting customer comments on the new look… and Gap responds:
Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the things we’re changing. We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.
— Gap’s Facebook status update
October 7th, 2010 – idsng.org posts a roll-up of reactions to the new logo and Gap’s plans to crowd-source, or not.
October 8th, 2010 - UnderConsideration pulls together the Mother-load post “Followup: Gap Gate” – demonstrating that gap consumers, designers, bloggers and the social web weren’t going to swallow the new logo and were ready to poke fun and actually compete for the title of “I designed the new Gap logo”
The Gapify Tumblr demonstrated how asinine the design decisions were and how applying them completely oversimplify and disregarded the key brand identity in any logo.
And my personal favorite CrapLogo.Me took a more in-your-face approach to describe how they feel about the new logo by creating a Gap logo meme.
By far the most controversial of reactions (see below) is Gap’s marketing pivot – “Let’s crowd source the logo design” which spurs into motion a $500 logo design competition by 99 Designs. The competition rang in a healthy 4660 entries – which spanned wide range of humorous satirical design to some legitimate attempts to resolve the company’s desire to move their brand forward. While this competition is not officially sponsored by Gap, we’re awaiting to learn the outcome of the, now closed, competition and what 99 Designs intends to do with the winning design. (UPDATE 10.18.10 – below)
Post-post Analysis Post: Everyone is all excited about crowd-sourcing design.. aren’t they? Wait… not everyone. Crowd-sourcing has done wonders for open technology platforms like Drupal and Jquery and opened content platforms like Wikipedia, but is it right for design? The main complaint to the world of crowd sourced design is that it appeals to the bottom feeder in design consumers and the desperation of a struggling designer which has a downward spiraling effect on the design market. Mike Monteiro from Mule Design sums it up in his “Gap, I have your new logo” post from Off the Hoof. Another jab at 99 Designs and Crowd sourced design at BonFX.
Oct 11, 2010 – Gap Inc. Issues an official press release- “Gap Listens to Customers and Will Keep the Classic Blue Box Logo”
Oct, 11, 2010 – AP Marketing Writer, Emily Fredrix, picks up the story and posts: Gap’s logo back to blue after fans gripe about new – now headlining on Yahoo.com Oct.12, 2010.
Oct 12, 2010 – Richard Grefé, Executive Director of AIGA| the professional association for design, (re) posts his position on Spec work with a letter sent to the Gap on October 7th.
If you want quality, if you have respect for the design process (research, conceptualization, design, testing), along with an ounce of self respect – you’ll pay the designer the true value of the labor and the product.
Why does Limina care about this? Our customers are primarily software, web-app and website design oriented, looking for ways to improve the user experience. While this resides heavily in user research and user centered design, it often touches and occasionally includes heavy consideration for brand identity. We don’t take the subject lightly – use acceptance can make or break a product. As we’ve seen with Tropicana and now with Gap – this level of market rejection can be costly – fortunately for Gap they didn’t roll out the new design across all of the product lines, stores, packaging, bags and collateral.
UPDATE 10.17.10 – Things just went from bad to worse. 99Designs sent out a blast to the community to participate in “voting” for the best Gap logo design. It’s as if the 99Designs crew got cold feet in fear of a backlash from the design community if they picked a weak design. So they’re throwing it back at the crowd. “Here… you guys sort out this mess”.
-Jon Fukuda
It’s clear that the digitization of the Book has opened great possibilities for changing the way we consume, contextualize and engage in literature. Below is a post I found on Core 77 which shares IDEO’s exploration of various ux themes and concepts for interacting with digital books.
(Reblog)
IDEO released a five-minute video exploring the future of digital books. Their illustrated concepts highlight some interesting opportunity areas in the publishing industry through three distinct reading experiences:
Nelson reinforces books as critical thinking tools, providing multiple perspectives, references, and current conversations on a single subject. The layers of information beyond the book itself provide greater context and encourages a deeper dive into the book throughout history and into the future.
The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.
Coupland addresses the challenge to stay on top of the thinking and writing in our world and professional field that so many of us feel. Readers can easily keep up with “must-reads” by following what colleagues are reading and interact with them through “book clubs” and other social layers (discussions, suggestions, lists, purchases) to help each other share and learn.
Alice explores new ways for users to interact and affect written narratives by introducing non-linear and game mechanics to reading. By introducing the reader’s active participation, this concept “blurs the lines between reality and fiction.” Certain interactions allow the reader to transcend traditional media by utilizing geographic location, communication with characters, and user contribution to storyline and plot.
A very cool blue sky project from IDEO to say the least. I enjoyed the way they chose to compartmentalize the functionality rather than attempting to redefine the book in a single all-inclusive interface (a failure we see in most of these concept projects). This project, and examples appearing all over the industry, only further prove that the future of books in the digital age does not lie in single solution but rather a utilization of technology to better address the wants and needs of users to share, interact, and learn more through specialized design solutions. We are certainly on the precipice of a whole new world for this morphed understanding of the “book.”If you are interested in hearing more about IDEO’s project, check out the interview with two of the project’s designers, Duane Bray and Robert Lenne, on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show. There’s also a conversation about the topic going on over at IDEO’s Facebook page.
Video and photos from IDEO.
This post was originally posted by Willem Van Lancker, 21 Sep 2010
We get a ton of hits on our Agile Approach page so I thought I’d take an opportunity to give some more background on our methods and share some of our experiences. The Limina Team comes from a traditional Waterfall or Rational Unified Process software development background. Our consulting history and practice methodology is an adaptation of best practices developed in-house by user experience professionals and collaborators who’s expertise run the full spectrum of user interface; research, analysis, strategy, management, interaction modeling, information architecture, design and development. As a result, we have developed a suite of services that can be applied throughout the full span of the product development lifecycle.
As a practice, our methodology has been flexible enough to add value to every client engagement in our portfolio. As our team engaged on increasingly more frequent Agile/SCRUM driven teams, a trend which began for us in 2006, we needed to make some adaptations to keep pace with rapid iterations. The following is a rough breakdown of the adaptations we made by “activity”.
We tool a look at the activities and deliverables we execute in a more verbose and lengthy cycle and dissected each phase to determine which tasks and deliverables dovetail with the Project, Incremental Release and Sprint cycles of an agile project life cycle. Each level invariably incorporates tasks and deliverables from the traditional Analysis, Definition, Design, Development phases. Here’s what we came up with:
Product Cycle: Assuming 6-9 months.
Intense Observation and Analysis activity in the all important “Phase Zero” a period of three to six weeks. In the absence of the waterfall lead time, this is the cycle where UX research seeks to identify the following in rank order:
Release planning: “Iteration Zero”.
While rough concepts are being established to determine technical frameworks and baseline use cases, the UX team takes 2 weeks to elaborate on the primary storyboards to cover feature definitions in the first iteration.
The At this phase, requirement gaps have been identified, rudimentary user typologies have been identified, development road map has been established based on technical complexity, feasibility, business benefit and user benefit. Relevant personas for the user stories and features are drafted, usage scenarios are drilled down, the draft interaction model is established and the associated process flows and wire frames are generated. This iterative cycle is a lather, rinse,and repeat.
Ideally after 2 weeks iteration zero kicks off user stories, wire frames and mockups and will be available for itteration one development work.
While UX team is cranking out user stories and related assets for iteration two, custom asset creation and spot UI reviews run in parallel in support of iteration one.
This completes the lather, rinse, repeat cycle.
Meanwhile, persona assets, user stories and related assets are aggregated up for incremental release review. Any usability or user experience hurdles are triaged and assessed for re-insertion into the iteration plan. Instructive text, user help documentation are written and evaluated for release.
Benefits and Lessons Learned
As a seasoned UX practitioner, I know the value of getting the requirements right before writing a line of code and my initial reaction to agile development was harsh to say the least. It’s just a temporary jolt. Once you get in the swing of rapid iteration and continuous design, you barely miss lengthy requirements gathering and documentation. The clear benefit is low upfront project spend and near term return on investment. In traditional models, upfront costs on analysis, strategy, definition and design don’t immediately translate to rapid deployment. And the upfront cost is significantly higher to account for end to end specification prior to development.
In an agile team, the analysis, strategy and definition are more light weight and design an development run in parallel. If high yielding business benefits are addressed in the early release, you will be seeing a return on the investment earlier than you would have if you staggered the design and development in waterfall fashion.
One major lesson learned for Agile UX in practice: It is absolutely critical to get one or two iterations ahead of the development team. One slip, and you lose any runway for giving yourself the time necessary to construct successful solution to meet the needs of your users.
Happy Sprinting UXers
-Jon Fukuda
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