This TED video hit my iPhone over the weekend – more info at the Siftables page and on David Merrill’s page at MIT. I found the concept engaging enough, but the applications that the David, Jeevan and their collaborators have developed are exceptional.

The excitement I feel around this technology is similar to what I felt when I first saw Jeff Han present the multi-touch interface at TED. It didn’t take long for Han’s ideas to reach the mainstream through the iPhone. I wonder how long before we’ll see Siftables translated into a commercial product?

I’m a big fan of sustainable design – especially when designers turn their hand to addressing problems such as preventable disease reduction in the developing world.

Some time ago I came across what I consider an amazing product called the LifeStraw. From the LifeStraw website:

Half of the world’s poor suffer from waterborne disease, and nearly 6,000 people – mainly children – die each day by consuming unsafe drinking water.

LifeStraw water purifiers have been developed as a practical way of preventing disease and saving lives, as well as achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe water by the year 2015.

At USD$25 each (for the family version), LifeStraws are a low-cost (by developed world standards) means of purifying water to prevent common diarrhoeal disease.

At around the same time I also came across Project H Design, which:

… is a charitable organization that supports, inspires, and delivers life-improving humanitarian product design solutions. We champion industrial design as a tool to address social issues, a vehicle for global life improvement, and a catalyst for individual and community empowerment.

I saw on Project H a initiative that aims to provide families in Mumbai with LifeStraws – and I thought this would be a great cause to support.

Part of my “charter” for Zumio is to donate 1% of Zumio’s quarterly net profit to a project with social justice or sustainability goals, and for the Mar-Jun 2008 quarter (yes – I’m a little behind!) I’ve put the funds towards this project.

Unfortunately with the Aussie dollar fluctuating so rapidly my donation probably isn’t stretching as far as it could have, but all the same I hope that my small contribution will help…

The other day I rocked up to Greater Union on George street with some friends to catch a movie. Forgetting it was “tight-ass Tuesday” there was a long line, so I thought “I’ll jump into OneTap Movies and see if I can buy tickets” – then I could jump the queue using their pre-purchased tickets line.

OneTap Movies is an iPhone application that uses GPS to find the nearest cinema, and then allows you to browse the movies and times for that cinema. You can even preview some movies and see ratings.

It’s a great little app, but it’s missing the killer feature: you can’t buy tickets – as I found out that night. (Certainly this is the case for my local cinemas.)

So I thought “I have a fully working browser on my phone, I’ll have a crack at the Greater Union site”. I quietly hoped they had taken the initiative to develop an iPhone specific interface, but I wasn’t banking on it.

I got to the Greater Union site and waited for the ~500k worth of media to slooooowwwly stream down (the home page rates an F using YSlow). The site also uses tables, which meant that the key interface component didn’t display until the entire page had downloaded.

I then started to use their JavaScript enabled interface, only to find that it failed at the first step – choosing a cinema.

So we waited in line, and by the time we got to the desk the session we were after had sold out.

A couple of things struck me in considering this short, but sad, tale:

1. If the Greater Union site used web standards more efficiently I probably would have been able to complete my purchase in a fraction of the time.
2. Buying movie tickets is the ideal application for an iPhone or mobile specific site. Greater Union, and other cinema chains, should be seriously considering a more tightly focused mobile-oriented site for this purpose, ideally targeting devices like the iPhone (but not restricting it to only work on the iPhone).
3. If Greater Union had a web-services API for purchasing tickets (with a revenue sharing model for extra incentive for third-party integrators), then I suspect OneTap would have full purchasing capabilities built-in. This would mean referral revenue for Greater Union from applications they don’t have to build, as well as a better user experience.

Such an approach fulfils a couple of the key principles I outlined in my recent CPA presentation:

• Leveraging the network: OneTap Movies includes user-generated ratings – but the personal utility (finding what’s on) is the primary focus of the app.
• APIs: providing an API would potentially expand Greater Union’s market significantly through third-party applications. (This also relates to the “because” effect.)
• Clip of sale: by revenue sharing Greater Union make more money, through increased referrals, while encouraging third-party developers to leverage the API.
• Embraces mobile and geo-targeting: two concepts I mentioned as playing a significant role in future online apps.
• User-centered, contextual design: mobile access to decide on movie attendance and purchasing tickets fits strongly with user motivations and wants.

So how about it Greater Union?

This is a little old now, but still worth making mention of. Jakob Nielsen, in his AlertBox column Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click, makes some good points, especially about the importance of search and the impact that has on homepage design.

The impact of search

He points out that while the homepage of a site is typically the single most visited page, it’s usually the content pages of a site, in aggregate, that get the most visits overall. This follows the principle of the Long Tail – and I’ve seen it with a number of sites I’ve worked on.

This is a reflection of the increasing power of search – visitors come to a site because a specific page has been returned in a search result. Jakob mentions that bounce rates from such visitors can be quite high, and he suggests some approaches for reducing them.

The role of the home page

Specifically, and interestingly, Jakob singles out the home page as “the orienteering point for visitors who arrive through deep links and then decide to explore the site further.” This is something I hadn’t quite put my finger on, though it intuitively makes sense.

If I find a site that has some interesting content, I’ll have a quick look around the page to see if there’s launching points to other relevant information. The home page is often a place that I go to get a “100 foot high view” of the site – one method of determining if there’s anything else of interest there.

Choose the right metrics

He also suggests, somewhat controversially, that ‘”Unique Vistors” must die’ – in other words: the metric of the sheer number of visitors to your site is not adequate to determine site success.

Given growing bounce rates, we must stop using “unique visitors” as a metric for site success. Site tourists who leave a site immediately ratchet up the unique visitor count, but don’t contribute long-term value.

Unique visitors, of course, do play a role in a balanced review of site statistics. But the point is well taken.

I think using this metric as the primary measure of site success is problematic for more than the reasons Jakob points out. In projects that I’ve been involved in where visitation rate is the primary “success” KPI, the projects have usually been too heavily swayed towards trying to get as many people – any old people – as possible to a site, rather than considering how to really focus on a core audience and engage those participants to achieve organisation goals (while/through fulfilling participant needs, of course).

In other words, the focus shifts to how many people are coming through the door, rather than getting the high-value folks coming through, and bringing their friends back with them.

Reducing bounce rates

The remainder of the article provides some useful segmentation ideas for determining the value of users and makes some simple suggestions that can help increase visitor follow-through.

The idea of providing links to related articles is a strong one, but surprisingly difficult with some Content Management Systems (CMS) to get good results with (especially while maintaining site performance). It’s actually one of the more tricky questions in content design – how to determine what’s “relevant” or “related”.

Amazon have a great system in place that uses purchasing data to present a “people who bought this also bought…” list – a fantastic method of getting people to another point in the site. While not everyone has Amazon’s resources at their disposal, it’s worth considering these kind of features when developing your site – and to look around at what options are available for your CMS.

More than one path

And if you can create a few different options with this in mind, all the better. (Of course it’s important to not go overboard, lest we confuse our visitors entirely with a million and one options.)

This was one of the design goals with the newmatilda.com project that I worked on with Digital Eskimo. If you visit the home page or content pages, a lot of thought went into the various options that lead you to more content within this site.

Some of those listings are based on reader activity, others are based on relationship/relevance to the current article, others are completely random. In fact, one of the surprise elements of the design was just how interesting the “From the archives” section is on the home page.

The aim of this small panel was to expose a random article from the deep (5-year strong) archive of the newmatilda.com site. And I think it’s surprisingly effective at producing interesting results (although I don’t have metrics on what sort of impact the panel has on visitor flow).

When I was working at WWF-Australia a lot of effort went into making the organisation’s key email communications as effective as possible. So I was delighted today to see that Mathew from Freshview has chosen the Futuremakers email template as a sample of good email design in his SitePoint article The Principles of Beautiful HTML Email. (Thanks Mathew!)

A lot of “behind the scenes” work went into making sure that the email format worked across all the popular web email software (esp. Hotmail and Gmail). But also we had very clear objectives for the content layout, which is what Mathew highlighted in his article.

P.S. the email was also featured previously in the Campaign Monitor email gallery, which is a great resource for reviewing best practice in email design – as well as providing some nice eye-candy ;)