Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Facebook rolled out some changes to user’s profiles earlier this month, including a snazzy new band of photos across the top of most people’s profile pages.

This naturally inspired some people to find novel ways to express themselves using the ‘canvas’ at the top of their newsfeed, including (famously) Alexandre Oudin. After a few more days, there were sites popping up everywhere to do this to your profile in a few easy steps (Photo Magic, Oudinizer, Profile Maker, etc.).

Impressively, Schweppes acted quickly to get a developer to create a Schweppes Profile App on Facebook, as explained with the following video:

I like that they managed to turn around the app so fast, and keep the entire experience relatively simple.  My questions are:

1. This seems to be an activity that most people might enjoy, and I wonder if Facebook considered making the functionality native.  To be honest, the process is still a little complicated, due to the tagging requirements, and Facebook could get around these elegantly.

2. I think the resulting photo could have carried at least a nominal amount of branding - maybe even flirt with a facet of the product?  What about making you in your photo engage with the product in some way?

Although here’s a good example of what you should probably not do:

3. When these mercurial changes occur on Facebook, I wonder if there is really any benefit to the ‘first out’ application.  The app seemed to have some loading troubles a few times when I was using it.  Stability should be pretty high on the list of requirements, one would think.

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Check out this highly interactive site by Redbull.

You can easily build your own plane design in this fun application and take it to the sky, to see how well it flies. A great inspiration for all those who program flash. Also, what I found really well done was the level of detail as far as making even forms and buttons usable.

Also VERY surprising for this brand: MOZART. Can only be explained by the fact the Red Bull’s CEO is Austrian, and Austrians think Mozart was Austrian.

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We recently completed a multi-market user experience / usability test for one of our clients. Many hours of planning and organization, as well a design and prototype developments went into this, as this was a test for a major european roll-out, and a lot of design assumptions had to be verified.

However, there are so many smaller projects in which, due to timing and budget, usability is never really tested. Sure, for a lot of things you can rely on the empirical knowledge of a senior user experience planner, but really observing people and their behavior with your end product, always shows that you can optimize the experience. Sometimes, you even find critical issues, no matter how well you thought it through.

Therefore, the question for anyone charged with the planning of experiences always is: how do we get user experience testing set up without being on the client’s agenda or in his budget? We usually fall back onto informal testing rounds and rapid prototype development with the designers making changes as planners generate insights and recommendations. We also developed small modules on how accomplish quick turnarounds on such issues as screening and recruiting and developed special agreements with our testing partners. However, we never formalized it as a process.

Today, I came across a great article by Paul Nuschke of Boxes and Arrows and his approach to the problem. Definitely a good read for all the Experience Planners out there.

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