Welcome to my battlefield

[dmytroboiko]

Effective teamwork above all

This semester I was involved in some group projects. Yesterday my team members and I completed our last team assignment. So it’s a good time now to dot the i's and cross the t's. Turning back to look at the teamwork within some college projects, I’ll try to come up with a few recommendations that reference my personal experience.

1. Every team player should remember about interdependence. That means all members succeed only if the team succeeds. A team failure means a failure of everyone. Even if people have distinct interests, goals and expectations, team consciousness should prevail over the personal desires. Often, high concentration of ambitious personalities can be a reason of a project’s failure.

2. Effectual communication is a crucial factor of effective teamwork. Each team member has to express his/her own ideas distinctly, listen carefully, ask appropriate questions and participate actively in team discussions. Based on my experience, lack of frequent and appropriate communication within the team can provoke misunderstanding and resentment. Luckily, the modern digital communication tools (e-mail, various messaging services, Skype, etc.) help to fix solid connection between teammates even at distance.

3. It is necessary to have a team leader, a responsible person for each project. The leader must maintain perfect functional relationships with the rest of the team, delegate tasks and monitor everyone’s progress. I can declare that the group projects, managed by a designated responsible person, went very smoothly and confidently.

4. All members of the team should negotiate common aims and expectations before starting a project. Differences in goals can easily cause tensions and conflicts. Sometimes I noticed that not all team members had the same goals. But this case is very natural and could be easily explained. For instance, one person is focused on the final grade mainly, second person prefers a work process itself rather than the final result, third person finds some specific components of the work as the most relevant for him/her, etc.

Obviously, I’ll keep all these things in mind when I plan the next group project. But, to say honestly, all challenges, tensions and communication issues, I had during the teamwork, let me get the really huge experience. Finally, I’d like to thank my lovely teammates. I’ve learned a lot from them.

[dmytroboiko]

Tumblr: Track this tag

I’d like to introduce Tumblr, one of the most consistently growing social networks.

Supposedly, the facts speak louder than words. That’s why I’m going to present some impressive statistic numbers.

 - There are currently 102 million Tumblr blogs

- 44.6 billion posts have been published on Tumblr

- 6.6 billion page views in March 2013

- Average user spends 23 minutes on Tumblr per visit

- As of April 2013 the top 5 countries using tumblr are: US, Brazil, UK, Canada and Russia

 Business cases:

1. Adidas

Mashable: “Adidas's Tumblr is one of the most beautiful we've seen. Interactive, clean and full of color and personality, it puts the products front and center without seeming like the brand is force-feeding them to customers.”

2. Whole Foods

SearchEngineJournal: “Is it weird to describe a Tumblr blog as attractive? Maybe. But, that’s the perfect word to describe Whole Foods Tumblr. Besides pushing what the store has on shelves, there are also posts featuring recipes or content from other sites so that there’s a plethora of material to inspect.”

3. Target

BritWeb: “Target tends to reblog photos from fashion bloggers who have worn their clothing and mix this in with commercial and seasonal content that they have created – of course keeping it fun.”

4. Coca-Cola

Digiday: “Coca-Cola knows its audience — and the Tumblr community — so GIFs are prevalent along with aspirational and inspirational posts. Coke was also one of the early advertisers on Tumblr.”

 Tumblr Pros:

1. Blogging platform

Tumblr is both a microblogging platform and a social network.

2. Interface

Tumblr has remarkably rich and simple interface.

3. GIFs

Animated GIFs can be used to grab the reader’s attention (e.g. GIF-files of recipes or products).

4. Maintenance of unique corporate design

Tumblr offers numerous free and premium themes with lots of customizable options.

5. Google Analytics

Useful statistic data about blog's traffic, traffic sources and conversions.

6. Mass posts edit

Tumblr Mass Post Editor allows modifying great number of blog posts simultaneously.

7. Integration with other social media platforms

Numerous Tumblr themes provide good integration with Facebook and Twitter.

 Tumblr Cons:

1. Target audience

Supposedly, Tumblr has a relatively young audience.

2. Long text posts

Long text posts aren’t about Tumblr. GIFs, pictures and short videos are the most popular content.

3. NSFW GIFs and pictures

Unlike other social networks, Tumblr doesn't censor most things.

4. Traffic

Most traffic currently comes from the US.

5. Main topics

Design, fashion, and music are the most popular topics of the Tumblr audience.

6. Comments

The default Tumblr blog does not have a native commenting system.

7. Spam

It’s necessary to be aware of spam and phishing accounts as well as accounts focused on specific NSFW content.

 Tumblr isn’t integrated in the assigned company’s social strategy yet. It’s important to know that since being purchased by Yahoo!, this social platform got its second wind. A big potential for new advertising opportunities will have many brands taking another look at Tumblr. Without any doubts Tumblr can give more flexibility and expression to the concerned brand.

 Best Business Practices:

1. Promotion of user generated content

2. Appropriate tagging

3. Focusing on visual content

4. Selecting a very tight niche

5. Providing links to the corporate web-site

6. Close integration with other social platforms

7. Following other Tumblr blogs

 Additional links:

1. A Tumblr Tutorial for Brands

2. Best Practices for Social Media

3. Best Practices For Using Tumblr For Marketing

4. Tumblr For Business: Why You Should Use It Now, And Probably More So In The Future

[dmytroboiko]

CSS3: Surprise, surprise

One of the most significant and striking things I’ve learned on the coding classes is CSS3. How did it surprise me? I was sure that the main role of a CSS file is simple managing of the style of web pages. For sure, we use Cascading Style Sheets to maintain colors, fonts, links etc. But it was quite obvious to me that I must deal with some JavaScript libraries to make really unique and advanced web-design. Ultimately, close interaction with CSS3 changed my thoughts about this matter. Let’s take a look at some advantages of this style sheet language.

CSS3 is the latest edition of the Cascading Style Sheets language. It offers a huge variety of new ways to create impressive and stylish designs. Now all designers and developers get the great flexibility to create complex effects with CSS3. What’s more, it brings a lot of innovations: box-sizing, multiple backgrounds, opacity, shadows, gradients, transitions, animations, custom web fonts, etc.

New features can considerably help all creators to make websites more flexible and to reduce development and maintenance costs.

At the same time, the well-known weakness of CSS3 is some inconsistency in design of web-pages across various web browsers. That’s why, using browser-specific extensions in a CSS file is highly recommended (-webkit- for webkit-based browsers, -moz- for Firefox, -o- for Opera, etc).

Nevertheless, support for the latest CSS3 properties is becoming stronger and stronger in the latest versions of all the major browsers. That means even greater possibilities for typography, animation and interactivity in the Web.

An amazing attempt to recreate our solar system using CSS3 features such as border-radius, transforms and animations (Link)

New cascading style sheets allow designers to achieve new design features as well as maintain current design elements in the easiest way.

To sum up all mentioned above, CSS3 properties can greatly improve the creative process by making some of the most time-consuming tasks much clearer and easier. Thus, new CSS is a very powerful tool that could be put into practice in the website’s design today.

[dmytroboiko]

Sharing of social media experience

Social media marketing is becoming more and more important for digital marketers. Brands tend to create massive and elaborated social media campaigns via various social platforms.

Obviously, business focuses on increasing of website presence, growing of the number of followers and multiplying of corporate website traffic. The main trick is that successful social media campaign can reach millions of people across the world.What’s more, numerous global campaigns are relevant for different countries, cultures and languages.

I’d like to describe two of my favorite social media campaigns.

Crack the US Open

Instagram campaign of Heineken called “Crack the U.S. Open” is probably one of the most innovative and unique social media campaigns. Famous Dutch brewing company found a new way to use Instagram within its sponsorship of the US Open, one of the oldest tennis championships in the world. Thereby Heineken opened a special Instagram page and invited all tennis lovers to join a scavenger hunt.

Heineken’s @Crack_the_US _Open page on Instagram

Instagram users had to scan the tennis crowd in more than 250 separate pictured, find the particular person and hashtag the correct picture. By replying with the code word and the right photo, tennis fans had a chance to win tickets to the tournament.

Click here to watch the video.

The contest continued for three days. Almost 1500 people took part in 7 photo hunts. The game was hailed a success for promoting Heineken’s sponsorship of the US Open. As a result of this campaign, Heineken increased its followers by 20 percent.

Pepsi’s Bus Levitation

In 2012 PepsiCo launched the global campaign called “Live for Now”. Within the scope of the campaign, Pepsi partnered with emerging entertainers or artists from a variety of disciplines, from music to sports.

To promote own product – sugar-free cola Pepsi Max, American corporation organized a bunch of online and offline activities. Impressive Pepsi Max campaign featured a magician named Dynamo. For the launch event, Dynamo hung from the side of a double-decker bus on its journey along central London streets, while hundreds of passersby watched in amazement. A hashtag #LiveforNOW was on back of the bus.

Magician in London: bus stunt for Pepsi Max

The promo video of magician levitation went viral with 3.5 million YouTube views in a first week. Dynamo’s exciting stunt provoked a huge amount of interactions and was shared more than 120 000 times.

Click here to watch the video.

The campaign also included massive promotion on cans and bottles of Pepsi Max. Consumers had a good chance to win hundreds of prizes. One of them is opportunity to unlock new exclusive tricks from Dynamo.

[dmytroboiko]

Art pretends to be technology, technology pretends to be art

According to Oxford dictionaries, trend is a general direction in which something is developing or changing. What are actually changing? Technology? Yes, totally. Are design and art evolving? Without any doubt. What if I say that technological art is one of the most impressive and fast-growing trends now? Not sure? You must visit Ars Electronica Center.

Ars Electronica Center is well-known as the "Museum of the Future" and one of the most spectacular sights in Linz, modest industrial city in Upper Austria.

3,000 m² of exhibition space provide an ideal place for innovative projects at the interface of art, technology and society. The museum has six floors filled with creative works of artists all over the world.

Ars Electronica Center in Linz

Among the many institutions that promote art and technology blending, Ars Electronica is somehow outstanding because of its strong orientation towards participation and involvement of the general audience. Unique installations invite visitors of all ages to get actively involved. You can’t find there “Do not touch” signs – every object is intended for close interaction.

I want to emphasize some historical facts. Austrian organization named Ars Electronica was founded in 1979 around a festival for art, technology and society. In addition to running the yearly festival, the organization also started to maintain so called “media museum”, the Ars Electronica Center.

From very first projects in 1979 to modern sophisticated installations, Ars Electronica presented numerous installations and performances featuring elements of interaction, robotics, telecommunications etc. For years, interaction designers, media artists, software and hardware developers have been working together in flexibly arranged teams.

It’s necessary to mention that Ars Electronica maintains contacts to thousands of artists, scientists, technologists and engineers all over the globe. “Shared creativity” is one of the fundamental principles of the institution.

Currently Ars Electronica is well-known global platform for high-tech art which consists of the following four divisions:

Ars Electronica – Festival for art, technology and society Prix Ars Electronica – International competition for artists Ars Electronica Center – Museum of the Future Ars Electronica Futurelab – Laboratory for future Innovations.

The center in Linz, also well-known as “Museum of the Future”, is a place where variety of artistic genres, scientific methods and technological know-how are merged and demonstrated. Biotechnology, genetic engineering, neurology, robotics and media art are presented here in different unbelievable forms and shapes.

To add more details to this story I’d like to describe one of the strongest impressions of my last visit to the museum.

Project “Telenoid” reveals a new form of telecommunication. Telenoid is a child-sized robot through which users can interact with others from a distance. The control system tracks the user's face and head motion and captures his or her voice. After that the facial expressions and voice are transmitted to the robot, which expresses them while interacting. Telenoid allows people to feel as if an interlocutor in the distance is next to you.

Telenoid – robot for communication

Please click on the link to watch an appropriate video.

Without exaggeration, Ars Electronica Center is a striking cultural phenomenon. Its interactive installations give a glimpse into the secrets of media world, and enable visitors to become designers of the future. No conventional art, no traditional technology. Isn’t it real trend?

[dmytroboiko]

Tagging the brand

Many things can happen in 1 minute. According to some researches, in 60 seconds, almost 300 000 statuses are updated on Facebook, WordPress bloggers share more than 1 500 new posts, web users download about 15 000 songs, Instagram users upload up to 70 000 photos…

It is commonly suggested that to increase your brand presence, you need to be active on all possible forms of social media. But maintenance of all various social platforms can be extremely time consuming.

When a company just starts dealing with the Web it probably needs to pick a few social media networks to manage them with maximum efficiency. Thus initial choosing the most appropriate social platforms is particularly important for doing business or promoting own brand.

I’d like to select a few popular social platforms that could be applicable to Interactive Media professionals. Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr hold top three positions in my list.

Facebook

Facebook provides tons of opportunities to promote and advertise almost any content or products in the Internet. A lot of companies consider corporate Facebook pages as the crucial factor of brand’s popularity and fans close engagement.

In addition to attractive business pages, it’s very useful and reasonable to organize stand-alone campaigns on Facebook devoted to a new product launch, important events etc.

Recommendations:

Frequent and consistent posting

More posts means better chances of being seen. However, quality should be always over quantity.

Advanced targeting

Facebook has perfect targeting options. It’s quite easy to target audiences by location, age, gender, workplace, education etc.

Facebook Insights

Insights lets admins recognize the most popular and the most successful posts in terms of views, shares and likes. This data should be effectively used to assess the page’s content.

Facebook Insights

Asking questions

Simple and understandable questions and surveys encourage users’ activities. It’s not a secret that almost everybody wants to be heard.

Links:

Lay’s ‘Do Us A Flavor’ Contest: Customers Vote For Their Favorite Chips

Connected Campaign of the month: Pepsi Max

Burger King Lets People Sacrifice Friendships For Whoppers

  Instagram

Instagram is one of the fastest growing social networks. This platform allows users to instantly upload, edit and share pictures, comment on them.

For brands, Instagram offers quick and easy way to share visual content with followers.

Recommendations:

Relevant hashtags

Hashtags allow your posts to be visible for people who search for certain things. It would be also very helpful to use unique tags for particular campaigns and keep close track on popular trending hashtags.

Right balance of pictures

It’s essentially important to have a healthy balance of fun images and business pictures.

Wise using of filters

Instagram provides a number of filters to change the look of photos. But not all shots need to be adjusted, some photos look very impressive with no additional filters.

Instagram filters

Close integration with Facebook

Facebook page could be used to encourage subscribers to follow you on Instagramand vice versa.

Links:

Instagram Users Drawn to Sharpie

PUMA: Around The World In One Click

Heineken Crack the US Open

  Tumblr

Tumblr is a very simple and effective visual-oriented platform to share ideas and inspirational concepts.

Tumblr is commonly used for posting images, GIFs and videos. The social network has remarkable popularity because of numerous blogs that have gone viral.

Recommendations:

Picking the right theme

It’s very easy to customise the layout, design and functionality of your blog without any special coding knowledge. Tumblr offers a bunch of themes, many of them are free.

Google Analytics

All Tumblr can enable Google Analytics. Advanced metrics means useful statistic data about a blog's traffic, traffic sources and measures conversions.

Visual content

It is necessary to keep in mind that the main idea of Tumblr is visual media. Let your images do your talking.

Mass posts edit

By providing a special function, Tumblr has made it easy for its users to add a certain tag to all their posts. Just click on the link and edit/add tags or delete posts all at one go.

Mass post editor

Links:

Brands on Tumblr: IBM Sets the Standard for Engaging Content

Winner: "The Signal" Lexus Tumblr

Jaguar to use Tumblr in F-Type campaign celebrating Britain

[dmytroboiko]

Collective conscious

Brainstorming and collaboration are essential features of the modern world. Working on the same problem, people make profit on their collective intelligence.

Brainstorming is a process of generation ideas aimed to cope with a certain task. It encourages people to come up with own thoughts without fear of being criticized. Group brainstorming is very useful solution to take advantages of experience and creativity of all involved members.

Collaboration means teamwork of individuals to achieve a required goal. A group of people can work in the same office or distantly, interact in real time or have some shifts of time etc. Currently we have a bunch of collaboration tools that make a joint work much easier and faster. Supposedly, the most popular of them are Gantt charts, Kanban charts and to-do lists. Using unpaid or paid web-based project management tools like Smartsheets, Basecamp, Trello, Blossom, Asana etc., it is very easy and convenient to monitor every team member’s work load and progress of tasks. For sure, each tool has its features and advantages, so team has opportunity to determine what collaboration service suits it best.

On my previous jobs I used to have a quite significant experience in brainstorming and collaboration. Starting from traditional brainstorming with a flipchart and finishing with video conference call, I dealt with various collaboration tools depending on task and people involved in teamwork.

Doing my personal freelance and hobby projects I mainly use group-communication facilities of Facebook and Viber, document-sharing opportunity provided by Google Docs and such storage services as Dropbox and Google Drive.

Based on my experience I’d like to say that variety of available tools make possible working of collaboration projects of different complexity. Someone uses Zoho, someone is happy to have Yammer as the main working tool, someone thinks that Google Docs is more than enough… There is no universal solution.  Efficient collaboration has paramount importance anyway. If you do great job just using markers and whiteboard, go ahead.

Nowadays, it is hard to find a company which doesn’t have collaboration projects. I’d say it’s so untypical and weird to be out of this trend. Car manufacturers collaborate with automotive parts suppliers, design agencies and custom shops, clothing companies engage fashion celebrities, musicians and sport stars to make joint collections, music bands record songs with guest singers etc.

As an example of good collaboration work, I’d like to mention independent record label called Anticon. It was almost 15 years ago when I heard about this US-based label for the first time. Anticon was founded in 1998 by eight friends and musicians at the same time. Just a few years after launching, they became famous for creating their own sound and establishing a bunch of new musical trends. Collaboration was one of the most exciting and unusual trends. Anticon artists/founders are known for frequent collaboration, both within and outside of the record label. They released music in solo and group form, toured together, played roles of producers of albums of each other and shared label’s administrative jobs. Inspired of Anticon I’ve had amazing time doing various art projects in collaboration with like-minded guys.

[dmytroboiko]

Navigation menu: Keep to the pass

Navigation is one of the most important characteristics of any website. Without good navigation a site becomes totally useless. If users can’t find some necessary information on a certain site they simply will choose another one. That’s easy. So, how to make site useful and efficient? Which type of menu users really need? Which way of navigation I would choose? Let’s figure these points out.

First of all, as we already know, navigation menu must be easy to use and not confusing for visitors. The second thing, that should be considered as well, is menu’s design itself. Naturally, a navigation bar can be of different types and styles. From simple menus that are based on simple geometric figures and uncomplicated typography to menus with sophisticated graphics and animations. Basically, it is the duty of a designer to choose the right pattern of navigation menu to keep style and the main motto of a site.

In general, the type of menu you choose for your website will depend on the amount of pages there are, and the overall design of the website.

Horizontal menus are very popular. It’s probably the most common style. Horizontal text-based navigation consists of a horizontal list of the site’s categories, which are usually placed in order of importance, from left to right. Horizontal menus are great if there are not too many menu items that need to pan across the page.

Example of horizontal menu

Vertical text navigation is also quite common. It’s very useful in cases where a list of categories is too long to fit horizontally across the page, titles have a long length or new menu’s items should be added periodically. Sometimes left side and right side vertical menus play a role of a second bar which could contain a list of subcategories, for instance.

Example of vertical menu

Dropdown menu is used with both horizontal and vertical menus. It’s a perfect solution for complex and loaded websites. With using dropdown menu users can easily jump not just to the main categories of a site, but also to many of subcategories. What’s more, this type of navigation allows site’s administrator to add or remove menu items without affecting the layout.

Example of dropdown menu

There are also known numerous other types of navigation menus such as sub-menus, pop-up menus, menus with dynamic filters, mega-menus, menus with graphics etc. I consider each of them as a kind of advanced version of one of previously mentioned types of menu.

Example of menu with dynamic filters

Speaking about the main current trends in navigation menu, experts mention 3D transitions effects, flat design elements, SVG images and icons, mega-navigation concept, expanding bars, mobile-first design, CSS3 animated keyframes etc.

Example of mega-menu

What’s really worth additional explanation is responsive design. It’s probably the most significant trend of the last years. Supposedly, navigation menu is one of the most common and difficult challenges of responsive design for smartphones and other mobile devices.  There are known five common methods to make good design menu for mobile application: squeezing in successive lines, display as blocks, dropdown menu, menu icon and combined solutions. Currently, CSS3 media queries, jQuery and some other JavaScript libraries offer new and efficient ways to create exciting responsive web site navigation.

Example of responsive design menu

Tending to interesting and unique navigational menu designs, most web designers use JavaScript libraries (e.g.  jQuery) to add animation effects to navigation design for smoother and richer user experience. JavaScript allows you to add interactivity and feedback, making the user’s experience better and more intuitive. At that time, designers and developers create excellent navigation menus based on CSS. There are varieties of techniques that show great capabilities of CSS.

Example of jQuery menu

To create own navigation menu I will definitely keep in mind following further recommendations: proper and clear structure of the content, determined and arranged crucial site’s categories, consistency of information and design, simple and user-friendly terms and using web conventions.

Wireframe example with menu

In accordance with the existing content, the appropriate type of menu will be chosen.

Furthermore, working on this task, I’ll try to use CSS and jQuery navigation scripts to make stylish and eye-catching menu.

  Appropriate links:

http://www.webopedia.com

http://graphicdesign.about.com

http://designmodo.com

http://www.stylisticweb.com

http://sixrevisions.com

http://www.webgranth.com

http://www.hongkiat.com

http://www.awwwards.com

http://www.smashingmagazine.com

[dmytroboiko]

Challenges of creating content for a diverse audience

Living in the XXI century world we see almost erased borders between various cultures and nationalities. But it’s not true to say that these borders don’t exist. Despite watching of more or less the same movies and TV shows and having accounts in the same social networks we’re all different. Without any doubts people have really different religious and political views, interests and passions etc.

‘Challenges of creating content for a diverse audience’ in terms of Interactive Media means ability to be universal, flexible, comprehensive and well-timed. To be global and successful, developers of media content must be aware of all types of consumers of their product. Multi-national and multi-cultural markets require truly weighed and intelligent communication between creator and user.

Looking at my experience I’d like to give a good sample of differentiation of media content in accordance with a certain audience. I used to work for some international corporation which has numerous subsidiaries all over the world. Naturally to maintain company’s brand and style there was an approved corporate design manual. That means all employees from different countries have to follow the corporate style instructions to do their work in appropriate way. I remember very distinctly a few paragraphs from the mentioned design manual. There was information regarding some exceptions to company’s rules. The point is that promotional materials for the Arab countries have to meet some particular cultural requirements. For instance, soles of the leaping man‘s shoes must not be directly facing the viewer, female models with bare shoulders or short skirts must not be shown etc.

In my view respect is fundamental value in creating media content for a diverse audience. Narrative is significant and very persuasive when it contains particular sense of loyalty towards the different people.

[dmytroboiko]

On your marks!

‘Being an employee or self-employment?’ is very important and very controversial question. Some people consider that working for a corporation is highest level of their safety and comfort. Others, on the other hand, are quite sure that there are no better things than flexibility of being a freelancer or honor and drive of having own business. Let’s try to figure out what are the main aspects of employment in the Interactive Media field.

Despite quite usual things like covering of employees under provincial and federal policies and employer’s responsibility for paying official taxes and contributions the Interactive Media industry has some specific features. It’s pretty common situation when employer owns all intellectual property rights on employee’s works or even insists on signing specific papers to avoid of spreading any company’s secrets outside.

If we’re talking about freelancing job, it would be correct to say about great possibility of doing business without any official registration. Such feature could be very useful for those, who dream of a job outside of a corporation but at the same time feel a bit afraid of establishing own company.

Starting business means registration of own business name, getting a business license, responsibility for paying taxes etc. Many industry professionals consider all these bureaucratic procedures and highest level of risk as hard and inappropriate job which has no similarities to real creative work.

Internship is very important stage for those who just make first steps in the industry. Value of holding position of intern shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s unique work experience and great training opportunities.

Finally, many rookies aren’t aware of such as topic as dress code. Naturally, they look at the general picture and ignore some important details. That’s a big mistake. Nice trainers and funky clothes can be a really impressive cover for your portfolio.

[dmytroboiko]

‘Must buy’ or ‘help yourself’

Does customer-centric content work properly? Doesn’t organization-centric content give customers what they really need? Let’s make it clear.

To find one example of customer-centric content and one example of organization-centric content on the web I decided to figure it out due to more or less real and actual task. Initially I chose a product which I as a customer would like to buy online. New headphones play a role of a touchstone.

Obviously, in accordance with searching request ‘headphones buy toronto’ I got numerous results. My purpose was selection of two well-known local retailers from the Google’s Top 10. There were Best Buy (http://www.bestbuy.ca) and The Source (http://www.thesource.ca). From the very first look at the both online stores it became absolutely clear which one of them has customer-centric content and which one is a strong advocate of organization-centric content. I’ll try to provide detailed comparison below.

How to find an appropriate product

That’s first step in my analysis. What I’d like to see in the online-stores is variety of options, categories, filters etc. I mean all useful site’s features that make my choice as objective as possible and very comfortable. I found numerous criteria like Departments, Current Offers, Status, Brands, Price Features, Earpiece Style etc. at Best Buy. On the contrary, dealing with The Source wasn’t so easy and clear. By clicking on Headphones button customer has a kind of all-in-one list of categories. There are Earbud Headphones, Audio Accessories, Monster Headphones, Sport Headphones & Earbuds etc. Even having significant experience in electronics and audio related products it takes some time to understand what is going on there. It’s a really weird mix of different ear bud types, styles, categories and brands.

To do further steps in our investigation it would be correct to choose a certain model of the headphones. My choice is top-segment Beats Studio Over-Ear Headphones from Beats by Dr. Dre.

1. Product description and specifications

Best Buy: Extended and good structured information which tell us about product features, packaging arrangement, technical data and available accessories.

The Source: Very brief and very superficial product description.

2. Visual content

Best Buy: Eighteen high-quality photos that portray different views and different colors of the headphones.

The Source: Just one picture of the black edition of the headphones.

3. Customer ratings and reviews

Best Buy: Overall customer rating and rating for separated characteristics – Ergonomics, Performance, Comfort and Value. Three reviews.

The Source: No ratings, no reviews

4. Comparison

Best Buy: There is intuitive and easy-to-find function of products’ comparison. What’s more, the site offers us an alternative product with quite similar characteristics.

The Source: No option to compare various headphones.

Summary

Without any doubts we’ve got typical representatives of customer-centric and organization-centric content. To be honest, I haven’t purchased headphones in any of these online stores. What is necessary to say, I’m sure I’ll return on www.bestbuy.com without fail very soon. Should I explain why?

[dmytroboiko]

Up-to-date streetcar and out-of-date usability

I’m new in Toronto. I hadn’t even heard word ‘streetcar’ before I came to Canada. It’s funny, but actually this term was one of the new things that I’ve learned in my very first days here. On the one hand it could be just ridiculous coincidence. On the other, I see this case as a quite representative example of significant value of Toronto streetcar in the city infrastructure. It has passed almost a month since my arrival. I’ve heard a lot of information about launching new streetcar. It seems like this event is really long-expected for citizens of Toronto. To emphasize the importance of the new transport solution Toronto Transit Commission does its best and advertises own activities in the best possible way. For this purpose a bunch of various promotional material was prepared. There are a new video on YouTube, updated statuses on Facebook and Twitter, special categories and pages on the official site etc. Let’s figure out what is behind the official information provided by TTC. Is site’s content useful? How easily average user can obtain own search goals?

Before jumping to the deep analysis it is necessary to establish main criteria for the content evaluation. I mean objective usability criteria. Following recommendations of some well-known analysts I would like to select four milestones of the further research: Understandability, Learnability, Efficiency and Satisfaction. Let’s try to analyze the certain page content in accordance with these criteria.

Understandability

This characteristic speaks about understandability within perfect understanding of the main interface elements and navigation. I’d say that the chosen page has quite simple and good-structured layout. There aren’t overloaded categories.

Learnability

This term means easy and intuitive dealing with context to achieve common goals. Unfortunately I couldn’t find convincing and grounded arguments which show clear benefits of the new streetcar in comparison with the old one. What’s more, there are no appropriate pictures, schemes, infographics or diagrams that are very useful in case of objective describing of technological and/or complex products.

Efficiency

In this case consistent structure and elements make possible accomplishment of tasks with the highest performance. User has a good possibility to go from one streetcar’s feature to another one simply and quickly. Presence of headings of different size and unordered lists improves searching ability and common efficiency.

Satisfaction

The criterion is responsible for the site’s great appeal for user. Despite a quite good structure and navigation the site has very old-fashioned design. Conservative range of colors and unrepresentative photos don’t make great impression.

Summing up all stated ideas we’ve got very ambiguous result. Though page’s understandability and efficiency are quite good, it is hard to say something positive about such criteria as learnability and satisfaction. Nevertheless, we all want to go with the times. We all need up-to-date transport. I’m absolutely sure it’s the awesome new streetcar.

[dmytroboiko]

‘Hello new interactive world’

It’s not a big secret that the world is changing drastically. Currently we all live in the world of huge possibilities, in the world with blurred borders between countries, people and cultures, with virtual and augmented reality, with robot systems and neural networks etc. Everybody faces new technologies almost every day. We didn’t notice how so called ‘interactive media’ became an essential part of our usual life. What does that mean?

These changes lead to natural necessity of people to extend a field of their activities, to become more familiar with innovative technologies and tools, to develop own skills. Evidentially, professionals have to consistently boost their knowledge and qualification in accordance with rapidly changing market. What’s important, this process should undergo simultaneously with development of new media, new interactive environments, new digital and web tools.

To me individually, I can’t stand aloof new challenges. It’s not for me just being a witness. I see my role as an active player of the game, even rules creator. So, ‘Hello new exciting interactive world’.