Luke Wroblewski’s approach of ‘Mobile First’ and the pros and cons of using Balsamiq and Axure as prototyping tools for mobile site design was the subject of Monday’s Northern User Experience.

You can find out more about why Luke advocates designing for mobile first, rather than as a follow on to a desktop site, here, but presenter Keith Doyle gave the subject an interesting parallel by recalling Brian Eno’s experience of designing ‘the Microsoft sound’:

“The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem — solve it.”

The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 31/4 seconds long.”

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.

In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.”

Applied to the design of websites, the idea is that without the luxury of pixels and pixels of screen real estate, you bring a laser focus to what the user really wants to see on each and every page, rather than throwing every conceivable piece of content onto an overcrowded page.  And of course, you’re designing for the platform of the future (will consumers still be using PCs in ten years time in the face of tablets, mobiles and other platform developments?)

Wonder if Microsoft knew of Eno’s aversions to PCs at the time? He later admitted “I wrote it on a Mac. I’ve never used a PC in my life; I don’t like them.”

In January 2012, the European Commission is scheduled to announce its revisions to the EU Data Protection Directive, which has the potential to have a significant impact on the way businesses can collect and use data for marketing purposes.

What are these changes?
Whilst it’s difficult to say with certainty what will be in the new legislation, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has made its members aware of the contents of an unofficial copy of the draft legislative proposal, which has already been widely circulated. It contains some very significant changes to the current regime, such as the introduction of:

• an opt-in only regime
• a new ‘right to be forgotten’
• additional requirements for a valid consent

However, it’s important to note that this copy of the draft legislative proposal isn’t the final version. The text is currently in inter-service consultation within the European Commission and may well look very different when the final version of the Commission’s legislative proposal is published in late January. DMA members can click here to find out more and further details on the potential changes.

What are the DMA doing about it?
The revisions have been several years in the making and the DMA has been closely involved in all stages prior to the publication of the legislative proposal and has taken every opportunity to represent the interests of the industry. They have responded to the three European Commission public consultations, UK Ministry of Justice consultations, and participated in stakeholder meetings in Brussels.  Working with FEDMA, their European trade body, the DMA has played a full part in lobbying the Commission on the UK direct marketing industry’s behalf.

Once the proposed legislation is formally announced in January, members of the DMA will have the chance to consider the changes and assess how they will affect our industry. If, as the DMA expects, it contains aspects that unduly impede the industry’s commercial freedoms, then the DMA plan to lead an industry-backed campaign to ensure the European Union institutions consider the needs of our industry when shaping the Regulation.

So what can our industry do about it?
Once the DMA know what’s definitely being proposed, they plan to be back in touch with all their members with their analysis and plan to lobby members of the European Parliament and UK ministers. The DMA plan to co-ordinate DMA member action to achieve this and plan to provide full details of who to contact and points to make.

We’ll keep you posted as we find out more.

In conjunction with our clients development team we received a 5 star review for the new Lovepets.co.uk website, which they classify as:

“Superb. Impossible to fault in terms of design, content and features. Bookmark it now!”

Web User Magazine made the following remarks:

“Formerly called animalbargains.com, this relaunched pet store sells everything you need to keep your dog, cat, rodent or reptile happy.  LovePets stocks a huge variety of food, bedding and accessories, along with fish tanks, bird cages and more.  The clear categories and a speedy search facility make browsing a breeze, whether you’re looking for feline nail clippers or a heated rock for your lizard.  The TV section offers helpful videos on products such as a battery-operated flea zapper and there’s a price-match guarantee on everything sold in the store.  You can also join a Free Delivery Club, which is free to join, and saves you postage and packaging charges on orders below £49 (all orders over £49 include free delivery).  You can share comments and advice with other pet owners in the forums, visit the LovePets blog and social-networking pages and read and write product reviews.  It’s the purrfect bookmark for animal lovers.”

Facebook continues to be the marmite of social networking sites, and non more so than with its latest transformation.

Facebook Timeline

On 22 September Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, announced new partnerships with Spotify, Netflix, the Guardian and other media companies. “The last five years of social networking have been about getting people signed up,” Zuckerberg told Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco. “Until recently people weren’t sure how long the phenomenon would

last. Now social networks are a ubiquitous tool used by billions of people around the world to stay connected every day.”

Facebook has in recent months ramped up its attempts to attract and keep its users on the site in the wake of competition from Twitter and a new rival in Google+.

As part of the changes announced on Thursday, Facebook users will be able to automatically share activity such as viewing, listening and reading in a live “ticker” stream,

once they have opted in to the feature. The new stream will be separate from the existing Facebook news feed, although popular items – such as the most frequently played songs among friends – will appear in the column.

“We are making it so you can connect to anything you want. Now you don’t have to like a book, you can just read a book,” Zuckerberg said. “You don’t have to like a movie; you can just watch a movie.”

Facebook unveiled sweeping changes to users’ profile pages, including an online scrapbook, dubbed Timeline, which Zuckerberg said will “help you tell the story of your life”

. Timeline would allow readers to document important moments – such as birth, graduation and marriage – while maintaining “complete control” of privacy settings. Unlike Twitter and Google+, which are heavily focused on exchanging messages with friends, Facebook has become an online destination where people can record their own history. Facebook, which attracted a record 500 million people in just 24 hours, now allows users to watch films, listen to music and read newspapers without leaving the website.

Planet Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions never stagnate. Facebook has become the biggest social network on the planet, where friends and family can keep in touch, and figured out a way to generate advertising money from the time spent on the site. But now he wants to move beyond “like”; he wants us all to “read” and “listen” – to look at stories from magazines and share your music with friends to enjoy.

Facebook wants to be the centre of your web experience. That’s behind the redesign of the wall into a “timeline” – the line  of experiences recounted by your friends. Rather than being a simple line, Facebook’s offering the chance to organise it, with the photos and videos.

Music sharing – let friends listen together to songs through free streaming services such as Spotify. “It isn’t trying to block you from listening to songs you haven’t bought; it’s ab

out helping you discover so many songs you end up buying more content than you ever would have otherwise,” Zuckerberg said. His other ambition, obviously, is to be the next Steve Jobs – the pe

rson who makes you pay for music online.

The key is that he wants Facebook to become the de facto authentication mechanism of the web. Perhaps you’re sick of having to remember your login details at every different

website you go to (because it’s wrong to use the same password everywhere; if one site gets hacked then your online identity is compromised): he wants to make it possible for you to log in everywhere using just your Facebook identity, which of course is almost always your “real” identity. (What happens if your Facebook login gets stolen? Ah, that’s a different problem.)

For Google, still the biggest and most widely used search engine (even if it’s not the biggest in Russia or China), Facebook’s changes are yet another example of how s

ocial networking, a trick it has never mastered, still remains out of reach. Despite launching Google+, its own social networking service, to the world earlier this week, it lags behind by about 680 million users.

Facebook, meanwhile, is mutating before our eyes: no longer an evanescent startup, now a giant. MySpace, Bebo, Friends Reunited: they’re the past. Facebook more and more looks like the future. All hail the new Facebook!

QR codes continue to be talked about within marketing and agency circles, and the debate still rumbles on… will they become the same success in the UK as Japan. For me the answer has to be yes, but only as the adoption of smart phones reaches saturation as it has done in Japan. Technology such as this can only become wide spread when consumers are comfortable with the technology and see a purpose or advantage to its use.

Some recent research from America, created by the guys at Lab42 clearly demonstrates this point. Almost 60% of people say they are NOT familiar with QR codes at all. Meanwhile, 46% of people who use QR codes, scan them for discounts. And 42% of those people have used them as a Ticket, with 62% of those saying it was a concert ticket. Click on the image to view in full.

Following last months post reflecting the move amongst consumers towards the use of mobile search, OpenMarket, the payments firm, and Mobile Squared, the research group, surveyed 1,000 wireless subscribers, and found 36% would happily buy products worth up to £10 via their phone as a spontaneous decision.

Elsewhere, 62.2% of individuals questioned said they may be more likely to acquire goods and services offering mobile credits – equivalent to a money transfer on their phone – as part of a promotion than a competing brand not doing so. An additional 17.7% thought it was probable they would “recommend the promotion” to a friend, and 6.5% proved open to receiving further offers from the brand concerned in the future.

Almost 31% believed this kind of activity would increase the chance of their trading with the same company again, and 21% stated perceptions of brands providing such incentives would improve. Meanwhile, 54% of participants agreed entering debit or credit card information on a handset discouraged them from making purchases on a wireless device.

PayPal was the preferred payment option for 56.3% of respondents for transactions valued under £10, with mobile phone accounts on 24%, credit or debit cards on 15.5% and Google Checkout on 4.2%.

In all, 67% of the panel asserted the knowledge they would be charged correctly for an m-commerce acquisition and certainty about the security of their personal data was of primary importance.

Figures here rose to 69.9% among female interviewees versus 62.2% for men, and also reached 69.7% for 25-30 year olds, but fell to 63.6% of 16-24 year olds.

Just 14% of contributors gave a similar prominence to recognising the brand taking their payment, while 12.8% prioritised the ease and speed of making purchases.

“There are many occasions where they would happily pay for something but the process is so complicated it simply puts them off”, said Alex Moir, General Manager for Europe, OpenMarket. “It’s clear that consumers value simplicity and convenience, and will gravitate to brands that understand this.”

This research together with report last month clearly demonstrates the move towards smart phones and that consumers will begin to incorporate the mobile device more and more into their lives. As geo-location based offers, near field technology, m-commerce and promotional devices such as QR codes this will only gather pace.
Data sourced from OpenMarket; additional content by PCD Agency staff, 11 August 2011