I use multiple mobile devices on Apple & Android, and believe really strongly in a fair and balanced approach for customer experience. Why? Because we have evolved (partially) from the design for one browser mentality, and why would we waste time going back to that awful closed thinking?

Mobile is at a huge evolutionary step, and in all aspects of life we have to deal with other fanboys such as the iMyopia possee. Depsite the huge growth of Android and the benefits of HTML 5. Both of which I do admit are more attractive because they are open to me, but in honesty, neither platforms are perfect.

Only web apps can bring the balance that is needed and ease the development issues for cross platforms, and dammit as a customer and being involved in mobile development, choice is bloody important!

Would you open a shoe shop and offer only one shoe, in one size?

I’m trying to bring the choice wherever I can, and from a work perspective was very proud that my team & I were able to offer this to our customers this year with RMIT University’s first HTML5 mobile web app.

So where do we all go from here? Enter Scott Jenson, an ex Apple, and Google employee and mobile developer and strategist. A great talk and worth watching for his valuable and knowledgable insights in to the clutter of apps surrounding us, and I thnk only backs up what I and others have been saying which is…’choice’. Bring it!

Beautiful.

Via the always awesome Darth Ambiguous

A colleague shared an article on the excellent boxes and arrows site which I had not been on in years, and I discovered an excellent article. Written by Stephen Turbek, he points out some obvious, but oh so easily missed key design items that all site and app designers need to remember.

Good point on the Apple iPhone ads that of course, also trained generations whilst it played, and gave the perception it was easy to use. A huge factor in the iPhones success.

Read this gem of an article now

Related posts

• RMIT University is refreshing, mobile and open…
• How do colours affect purchases? In many psychological ways…
• The Spectrum of User Experience.

I rarely ever talk about my work here on this site, but we’ve undertaken some major work recently that I think is worth sharing.

It’s been three years since we took a redesign at RMIT, and in this case, we’ve only taken a refresh rather than a full redesign so far. Simply put, most web sites these days are incredibly hard work to change. As businesses realise the importance of digital media, every step becomes more careful, more planned, more throrough and more and more stakeholders are involved. 

Talking with colleagues in the education and other sectors at several social media conferences recently, it’s became clear that finally (finally!) over the last few years business have realised how crictical your brand and digital presence is across your site, partners sites, social and mobile. 

So with that in mind it was rewarding we could finaly make some of those changes recently. And with a successful site refresh done in recent weeks, a very successful mobile site for our Open Day today (see below), and an amazingly successful Open Day offline and online campiagn I’m very proud of all of the work we have done in the organisation. Only possible thanks to some very hard work, lots of debate and a large amount of people who have worked with us on all these projects and helped make them a reality. 

Now the really hard work begins : )

Image via http://www.metawedgie.com

No wonder Steve Jobs can’t stand flash. I’m with him on that one, and it seriously I think it has had it’s day. Flash development seems to be like IE6, determined to hang on till the bitter, bitter end.

Another nail in it’s coffin started last week with the latest version of Adobe’s flash player coming bundled with McAfee. A well known bloatware anti virus product.

If I missed the checkbox (apparently there was one), you can damn well know that millions will definitely miss it. Possibly due to the way firefox and other browsers install the update, you may not even see a checkbox like me. And that’s Adobe’s total lack of respect and integrity for it’s customers, it chases profits by bundling junk surreptitiously with it’s not very flavour of the month plugin. It’s bad enough you have to have Adob’e download manager installed as well…just to get the damn Flash plugin.

Is someone from Microsoft involved with Adobe? 8D

Sarcasam aside, in the last week alone the twitterverse has coughed up a ton of angry tweets at Adobe and not one response has been forthcoming. 

http://twitter.com/#!/search/adobe%20mcafee

That’s just one search on twitter alone, but many angry news and blog sites are lashing out, even Adobe’s forums are on fire, and Adobe’s response??

Check their twitter account: http://twitter.com/adobe and you’ll see Adobe seem to be high on themselves, performing self masturbatory smiley’s and congratulations while blissfully ignoring a lot of angry customers. The Adobe juice they are drinking, yes, it must be that good.

Obviously denial working well for Adobe, and my advice, keep doing what your doing Adobe…because your doing an exemplary job of fucking things up better than anyone could have hoped for.

Congratulations Adobe! And very much looking forward to the flash funeral!

..’cos truly no one can suck like they do. Seriously, when it comes to the last five years with their web browser’s user experience and strategy, they win at the suck. Big time.

Were not even talking the issues of web standards IE have been plagued with, and why it has been so bad since IE5, I’m just focusing on trying to download the new version!

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/internet-explorer/download/ie-9/worldwide  

I had to test with IE9 recently, and so with a glimmer of hope that things can’t have got worse, and may have changed for the better, off I trot to be greeted with this monster page:

The download page alone, displays at least nearly 50 different languages and versions. Utter complexity upfront, because y’ know the Slovenian Server version of IE9 needs to be on this download page…Yes I grant you this is IE9 Beta, so probably more a geek audience downloading it, but there are many others out there who will. They are called ‘customers’. So for most people they then get greeted with this welcoming option;

Now I know what this is above, but for most people I expect the following two thoughts to appear:

WTF is 32bit and 64bit??

and secondly…

WhereTF is Windows XP??

Nowhere, I can find on the site anything to say where the XP version is, and I have to use Google to find out that for over 50% of Microsoft’s o/s customers IE9 will not be available for them.

Microsoft do have a statement;

“Since you’re running Windows XP, you won’t be able to install Internet Explorer 9 unless you upgrade to a more recent version of Windows.”

The XP statement they have is very surreptitiously placed within a banner on the IE9 site home page, but it’s not clearly marked to me, and if you end up on the download page via search engine as I did, there is zero mention of XP being a no go. 

So really…wow. A whole new depth of ‘fuck you’ is served up here. Several hundred dollars, of perhaps millions if your a business, just to be able to use… a browser.  It’s clear Microsoft want your money and that’s the experience I get. If you have not bought our new toy, effectively screw you and your business. It’s not after all, referred to as ‘Internet Exploiter’ for nothing y’know. This is why your browser share declined for years, is still declining, and will continue to decline.

Dyson should concede, Microsoft again prove their power to suck.

At the movies the other night and treated with this pretty cheese-tasticly awful ad:

Yep, someone, somewhere, got paid for that. Anyway, lured by a glimmer of hope that someone had actually tried to do a hulu.com for Australia I headed over to www.fixplay.com.au Sadly I was disappointed immediately. Each and every programme is fairly old, but some good new-ish shows are there, so some kudos to them. I tried to watch and was greeted by, on every single video;

We’re sorry, this video is not available at this time.

I changed browsers and tried again, same thing. Refreshed, nothing. Every single video, all=FAIL! At this point a massive amount of traffic would leave, wouldn’t you? I nearly did, but then in frustration at this failure, I eventually noticed a small link way below underneath… 

Well that’s clear then, eh?

What fixplay have disastrously done wrong, is not put the users experience of the site first. Kinda shocking really, but then most sites don’t. And especially after paying for an ad, and the cost of cinema advertising. If me, and in charge? I’d be kicking some bum riiiight about now.

In a world where the flash player for video rules, and is cross platform, and where YouTube is king, Queen and the royal family of online video. Even with HTML 5 video steaming ahead, fixplay have bet badly on the bespoke browser plugin horse.The plugin at fault? Namely, Silverlight. Microsoft’s waste of time and not very cross platform answer to the Adobe flash player. Then again fixplay has investment by Microsoft , who also have stakes in channel seven and nine who supply the content. Poor buggers have no choice but to try to flog the plugin.

(Silverlight is frankly, more crap you and your browser do not need.)

So ironically given it’s called fixplay, and it doesn’t play for many of us, someone does need to ‘fix’ it. Even updating the message to ‘You need to install Silverlight’ would be the lazy but more workable option. Although for many, too late, and I for one wont be back. So before you can make an ad and spend money and state your product is ‘exciting’ and ‘change peoples life’s’, make sure a little ten minute basic user experience testing outside of the office or online with some geeks or beta testers gets done? Please?

It might not change your life, but will change your customers first basic expectations of your site.