The other day a friend of mine brought H&M’s global website to my attention again. Back in 2006 I was one of their consultants until I more or less lost the assignment due to the fact that I told them what the didn’t wanna hear – Your website sucks! Of course I was wrong and they were right. After all, they’ve been awarded time after time at major advertising shows (Thanks to among others to me and the team I worked with back then) so why wouldn’t they know what they are doing.
This is exactly where the problem start for most major brands – at ad awards like Cannes Lions, Eurobest, Clio and others where people with no understanding for how to build an online presence beyond Adobe Flash and cool animations take these monsters to new heights. Back in 2007 I was also a part of building these kind of platforms for major brands but behind closed doors I constantly tried to convince my clients that sticking to these worn out technologies was nothing but stupid.
Let’s take a look at couple of major players and have a quick look at their online presence.
The Online Nike Store
The online store belonging to the worlds leading sports brand. All built in Flash…in 2010
Nike has always been among the first brands to adapt to change. Back in 1999 when I took part in pitching them into Framfab they were even heading the pack.
At first glance it all looks great. The site design is inspired by blogging with that clear and present left hand menu hanging there. But once you start looking deeper it’s a mess. The entire store is built in flash which is just plain stupid. To Nike’s defense [click to continue…]
psst. You haven't missed the new app for kids aged 1-9 years old? It's created by my other company JAJDO. Check it out in the App store
The other day I spotted this video showcasing i-TAG augmented reality toys. It’s the result of a cooperation between toy manufacturer Mattel and James Cameron in order to support the launch of the motion picture Avatar coming in fall 2009.
These next generation trading cards comes with a 3-D Web tag, called an i-TAG, a technology developed by Total Immersion, With any ordinary webcam consumers can “scan” the i-TAG and it will reveal special content onscreen unique to the corresponding product. The content varies for each item, but can include [click to continue…]
For years people have been wondering – when will Amazon redesign their site. Of course it’s been changed in small iterations over the years but all in all it’s not that far from what they launched in 1995. Amazon is absolutely one of the best example of a formula one shopping experience from a social networking and artificial intelligence perspectives. But now they’ve taken the whole thing a step further. Basement.org shares the news that Amazon has launched a new shopping experience called Amazon Windowshop Beta. Wow – I’m exited.
So what’s Amazon Windowshop Beta. We’ll it’s basically what it’s called – a window shopping experience. As you enter the shop you get to navigate with your keyboard through a papervision/cooliris experience type of interface. As you browse the images and categories Amazon obviously things you’ll start shopping – this is where they go wrong according to me. It’s fun the first couple of minutes to browse the products but I quickly find myself missing recommendations, reviews, other suggestions etc etc etc. The flash interface let’s you play around for a while but I quickly get tired of the whole thing and leave – long before my buy now finger starts to dazzle.
Why is Amazon doing this? That’s a question I’d love to ask the people behind this. When the rest of the worlds is fighting to make their sites more user friendly, simpler design and at least 10% as smart as Amazon.com then these guys go the other way. It’s a little 2006 this whole thing.
Instead, why don’t you go truly rich? Why doesn’t Amazon launch TV instead. I’m calling it TV cause I don’t mean Video. What I think Amazon should do is launch a bunch of TV channels online, hosted both at Amazon.com and other social networks. They should make sure the bring on some TV personalities that creates a show much like Fashion TV or Top Gear for example. Travel the world and do reports, review products etc. While you’re at it make sure you integrate the products closely or even inside the shows. Make sure you launch a couple of widgets and iPhone apps to support this new thing. Bring in celebrities to ad some spice to the show. By doing something like this Amazon would embody their store and give it personality.
Amazon! Amaze us an launch the best freaking online TV channel out there. And of course…don’t let this beta turn into an alpha.
It’s friday afternoon and I just gotta get this out of my head. Have you ever wondered why you enjoy having a cup of coffee?
Don’t know about you, but many times a day I just feel I gotta get a cup of coffee. The same feeling occurs on a thursday and friday afternoon, but this time it’s a beer that signals the neurons in my brain.
Basically what happens is your brain probably signals that it wants you to relax and the answer is a cup of coffee (or tea or smoothies) since thats what you usually do when you relax in the middle of the day at work. A strong association. It’s funny cause I remember my first Beer or my first cup of Coffee, and the experience wasn’t a nice one. Instead it was rather disgusting. They both tasted like shit.
This is what we gotta do when we create communication. We have to associate things people don’t necessary like with something they do like. This way we’ll move those associations onto the brand/product/object that we market.
I’ve taken part in creating many Flash sites, but have always tried to make sure people don’t have to wait for the experience. Today, many price winners on competitions like Cannes Lions take forever to load. So, when you are part of the jury, the agencies instead post a video that showcases the campaigns. This way agencies make sure that judges in Cannes, Clio, Epica, Eurobest, NYF, LIA, DA&D and others don’t have to wait for that super duper flash site to load. Basically, the experience is totally overlooked.
So, do you think you would enjoy that Espresso of yours if it involved a wait that was measured in % and took 2 minutes one time and 4 the next and then 3.
Adobe announced today that Flash 10 is on it’s way and a first beta is available of their site.
The new version of the more than 10 year old animation and rich media plugin will create new possibilities for both designers and coders.
From a first glancethis morning the things that impresses me is the advanced text edit tool that among other things allows you to work better with asian characters plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.
The other thing that seems great (although I really haven’t seen it in action yet) is that the creative features now available in Adobe Flash Player 10 beta won’t slow down performance,
Grant Skinner, CEO and chief architect of gskinner.com says: “With Flash Player 10 beta, developers can enable SWF content to render through the memory bandwidth and computational horsepower of the GPU hardware processor, freeing up the CPU to do more – such as render 3D content and intricate effects, and process complex business logic. No other browser runtime has these capabilities.”
Still missing
What I personally lack is that Adobe has yet not solved how to minimized the font weight if you’re using asian characters and the fact that they haven’t created a better way to link dynamic text directly into databases during the building process. This is one area where Microsoft Silverlight has already gained good terrain.
ReadWriteWeb made me spend an early morning looking into Flash 10.
This blog is written by Johan Ronnestam. He's widely regarded as one of Sweden’s leading speakers and authorities in the field of modern creative and conceptual thinking and skill of innovating brands and their communication. In 2010 the readers of Microsoft Indikat named Johan Swedens most influential authority within digital communication
