Happy Emergency |
When you have to do something wonderful. the web, startups, governance, urbanism. by Lucas Dailey |
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Notes Inception Branding
Your brand doesn’t exist in your marketing, it exists in the minds of your customers. Simple, obvious, but it does raise a possibility: if your customer unlocks your brand meaning, that process of discovery will add a strong sense of ownership and desire.
To illustrate this idea let’s assume we have a clothing company launching a new product-line for which we’ve already developed a brand persona (a recently popular exercise involving the creation of richly developed fictional characters that embody the personality and philosophy of your brand.) Brand personas are useful visualization tools that give people permission to imagine the world through the eyes of their hero-product. Just as children who are asked “how would a smart kid answer this question?” will themselves produce better answers, so brand personas give employees the nudge to role-play beyond the professional personalities in which they’ve cast themselves and produce branding more in alignment with their brand’s values. For our example, our clothing company’s brand persona for their new product-line is targeted at young, edgy urbanites.
How do we derive the final branding from the brand persona, is it just a further derivation of the brand persona to media such as graphics and marketing materials? No, the final step is to add the customer persona, the fictional-character representation of the key traits of your customers, then find a vehicle to create your brand identity in the mind of your customer persona. Brand is not your product’s identity, it is the prism through which your customer creates that identity in their own mind.
That is exactly what A-style did, the Italian clothing company whose logo you see at the top of this post. To many, their logo appears to be a sturdy “A” with a slumping umlaut. But to their young, sex-positive market their logo in fact shows two people having doggy style sex. This was a symbol whose meaning their target market was equipped to unlock. Their customers felt a strong connection with their brand because the customer’s minds recorded it as though they thought it up.
This is an easy point to miss, and many companies don’t trust their customers enough to make the connection sufficiently and thus opt for more prima facie branding.
As an example of a company that fell into this trap, French Connection was pursuing the same market at the same time. They wanted the same young, edgy, sex-positive customers of A-style, but as their central brand vehicle their new FCUK logo required no target-market specific decoding, let alone any decoding by anyone in the world. Everyone who even glanced at FCUK reads it as FUCK, there’s no sense of personal accomplishment in recognizing it, it’s simply a here’s-our-brand pie in the face. It was edgy, it was sex-positive, but it didn’t create the same connection with its customers. It is an easy trap to create branding materials that give you the sense of your ideal brand, but it will never compete with brands that conjures the imagery in their customers’ minds.
To create a sticky brand your customers must create the brand themselves. You can bring them 90% of the way, but if they make that last 10% connection themselves they will make your brand their own.
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Notes"Government will never be a proper organ of progress because it relies on the support of a population with disparate ideologies." -
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Shared Worldview Communities to Supercharge Activism - The House Foundation
I’ve been developing this concept for a few years on a back burner in the recesses of my mind. Over the last year or so it’s been increasingly demanding, and about four months ago I started working with Lee Shanahan on the idea.
It’s current iteration can be found here, applying for a grant to develop it with the Knight Foundation. I’d love to hear feedback, and if you like the idea please “Applaud” it.
Text/Submission: http://kng.ht/ZTZCkz
YouTube Video (2:11) : http://youtu.be/4ZjNtPbf8FY
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Notes"Innovation: Connecting ideas in novel ways to create new solutions to old, previously intractable problems." -
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My Article in TechCrunch: How To Build A Revolutionary Political Social Network
I recently had this article published in TechCrunch, give it a read:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/24/blueprint-for-a-democracy-transforming-startup/
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Notes"When life gives you trolls, make a fucking troll martini." -
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"Poor writers try to write instead of trying to speak."
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Google Play Store Loses Battle With Optical Illusions
Warning: If you aren’t a designer you’ll find this uninteresting. Move along. Move along.
I spent a nightmarish 1.5 hours getting the Nexus 4 yesterday—How could G blow that it in so many ways?— and a few optical illusion UI issues jumped out at me. Let’s see what you think.
I would recommend opening the two full-size screenshots linked below to see the true before and after. With this tumbr theme the size restriction forces me to use 500px wide vignettes which minimize the impact.
Original
ModifiedBefore then After
And since the changes are subtle (but #4, below) here are the differences called out and the modified css.
There are really two underlying components of environmental psychology that are operative in these examples:
- We don’t see with our eyes, we see with our mind.
- Looking right is more important than being right.
1. Weakened Edges
The edges of white content background boxes are being eroded by the diagonal white line page background texture. That type of fine parallel hatching can cause tons of optical illusion problems, though because of their light color and relatively low contrast they’re not overly problematic here.
The solution is adding a mid-tone grey border at just the right opacity. You can’t see the border, but the box is stronger and edges don’t bleed. It’s hard to tell in the vignettes, but on the full screen pngs linked above its a pretty striking difference.
2. Choppy Type
Due to the same type of problem caused by the tight diagonal lines on the background, the “SOLD OUT” looks blocky, almost as though the font smoothing was disabled or there was a faint dark drop-shadow. Because of the higher contrast of the white diagonal on the dark background, as compared to the previous example, in this instance the diagonals cause the dark background to read as lines that erode the type. Compare the bold “SOLD OUT” to the bold “More options” below it. The original hardly looks bold at all (though this is also partly due to 13px vs 14px font size).
To fix this I added 3 drop-shadows of varying tones and opacities.
3. Slumping Title
The “Nexus 4” title should be vertically centered, but it isn’t. Actually it is, it just doesn’t look like it, instead it looks slightly lower. It’s subtle but on some level people will have a sense that it’s somehow “wrong”.
The cause is the thin dark blue bar on top of the main blue title bar. Even though the “Nexus 4”, is perfectly centered in the original, the addition of that thin dark blue bar unbalances the lower bar. Since they are so similar in hue and shade their shared edge actually bleeds together, making the lower bar seem taller. You also detect the bleed in that the thin dark blue bar almost looks like a drop shadow from the menu bar, doesn’t it? If you don’t look directly at it that edge looks like a gradient.
The dark bar is a nice touch though, so we don’t want to get rid of it. Instead I just shifted the “Nexus 4” title up a few pixels, changing the balanced 15px-15px into 13px-17px. NOW it looks centered in the main blue bar, and doesn’t look like it’s weakly slipping down the page.
4. We Get it With the Lines Already
Ok, this one isn’t that much of an optical illusion issue. Yes, the white diagonals are eating away at the most hierarchically important part of the page which could be fixed by layering some text shadows like we did before, but in this case the better solution is to just lose the lines.
Yes, we get that the gDevices are high tech, and edgy, and you’re intentionally thumbing your nose at the skeuomorphic fruit-bois, but in this case just be simple and bold. You don’t need that extra edginess, the slight bit of added interest is outweighed by the way it weakens the title of your flagship products. Androids UI is bold and edgy because of it’s stark modernism. You’re not selling the new Droid (yet). This is how Google makes a phone. Clean, simple, everything just works the way you want it. -
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Turntable.fm: Improve Your Algorithms or Songza Will Drink your Milkshake
The primary product of Turntable.fm (TT) is the curated music stream and that product is currently inferior to competitors such as Songza. The secondary product of providing a venue for aspiring DJs is often deleterious to the primary product by lowering the quality of the curated playlist. Nearly as bad, mediocre DJs prevent the quality of curated music from reaching its full potential.
To be successful Turntable.fm can’t just be crowdsourced music curation, it needs to be functionally meritocratic.
If TT can successfully provide a venue for aspiring DJs and keep a consistently high level of curation quality it could still meet it’s goals and beat it’s competitors.
Ideally the UX/UI would be entirely redesigned integrally with a rework of the reputation system, however even with the UI almost entirely unchanged a few tweaks to the algorithms and system could help TT become viable again.
Here are a few quick thoughts on algorithm design principles and some basic implementation suggestions:
Consistent Quality: Minimize Troll and Amateur DJs- DJs next play is locked 60 seconds before it plays, which DJs on deck can see. If 2 of 4 DJs on deck downvote before it plays that song is skipped. If their 2nd choice is also voted down their play is skipped and they take a hit to their DJ score. When a play isn’t vetoed the voting DJs have their DJ score affected by the outcome of the play.
- All rooms have minimum DJ scores and/or room-admin nominated DJs.
Improved Identification of Pro DJs- Convert DJ score from an absolute accumulation of points to a dynamic score such as between 1 and 100.
- DJ score unique to room.
- Heart/Lame/Awesome/ ratio becomes primary DJ score determinant.
- New/low-score DJs in the audience can virtually DJ: higher ranking DJs can see their next play selection and up/down vote it to affect their score.
- Multilevel marketing! Seriously, hear me out: Higher level DJs that positively rate picks from a lower ranking DJs that then goes on to become a higher ranking DJ will also raise the score of the DJ that identified their talent. And have their scores hurt if they support a DJ that goes on to be a dud or troll.
These suggestions would change the nature of TT but if they were well balanced they could encourage vetting without enforcing conformity, improve the overall quality of the music, and make the social interaction even more fun and interesting.
Ultimately TT DJs make the primary TT product and unless that product is solid TT will fail. In many ways these sorts of changes would transform TT from a crowdsource system to a collective intelligence system. -
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"We’re much smarter than our politics suggest."
