Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL’s.

cabel.name: Japan: URL’s Are Totally Out

Really good article. Highlights the how the exhaustion of good, descriptive domain names leads to a logical alternative: providing accurate keywords that users can type in to get to your site.

How many domains have you thought would be perfect but are already taken? Why even bother trying to haggle with a domain squatter when you can build your relevance in a few terms and build your advertising campaign around getting users to type in these keywords?

Plus, here’s your instant top-of-mind awareness: you’re now the brand people think of when they’re Googling your niche.

Tags: brands, urls, seo

Google’s gone wild on April Fool’s, just like they do every year.

This is why everyone loves Google. How many extra eyes are going to be on their sites today and how much extra positive "good will" will they receive (from users, bloggers like me, etc.)?

The moral of the story: Devote some time to having fun. Building things "just for fun" adds whimsy to a brand; this is the "stickness" or traction that many major brands lack. This is why Google is "fun and cool" (and, by proxy, popular) and a company like Microsoft is a "stoic corporate giant."

It never hurts to toss some money into making fun things happen on the web. (And, btw, RickRolling everyone on YouTube is the greatest Internet April Fool’s prank I’ve ever seen.)

A (partial) list of Google’s April Fool’s Day pranks

• Virgle trips to Mars
• Google Calendar Wake Up service
• GMail custom time (which duped my buddy Rohan)
• Changing every video on the homepage of YouTube to RickRoll you once you click on it.

Thanks for the delightful experience, Google!

Tags: google, experience design, delight, april fools

Google’s updated Google maps street view with a bit of St. Patrick’s day magic. These little “easter eggs” just help add a smile to Google’s user experience.

With maps, Google already built a delightful experience. Tack these little "extras" on here and there, and you continue to identify "fun, novel experience" with the Google brand.

Ernst & Young have just launched a site that I had a hand in building. EY Insight is a college prep tool for students interested in a career at EY. It’s the closest I’ve seen to a true JavaScript and Flash hybrid, mixing them together so well that you can’t really tell them apart. And, this is true high-fidelity JavaScript animations sitting on top of full-screen Flash video: they are damn smooth and look damn good all the while!

Why is it cool? It’s one of the first sites I’ve seen that mashes up JavaScript (in this case YUI) and full-screen Flash video. There’s some pretty complicated Flash/JavaScript interaction going on, and I really haven’t seen too much like it. (Thanks SWFObject and Alisdair Mills). This is the biggest YUI app that I’ve launched, and brings a nice, high profile to how much fidelity you can get out of a JavaScript app.

What did I do? With the design/UX team, I helped drive the interaction design for this one, especially the Picture Yourself app. Really cool, snappy, sensible interactions there: this is how to make a quiz "not boring". I also did a lot of the JavaScript heavy lifting (a big chunk of the JavaScript back-end and the Object modeling) as well as the bulk of the Flash / JS interaction work before helping David (below) when I could spare a minute or two.

Props to David Tong of Molecular’s San Francisco office, who was the sole full-time engineer on the project for doing some really nifty work.

Yes, I snuck in conditional compilation on this, too. Another interesting note: IE6 has some interesting issues while trying to destroy Flash objects and Flash streams. Seems to orphan them a lot. This might be worth another post in the near future.

Tags: yui, launch, production, ajax, flash, video

Here’s my first official post on Molecular’s blog. Reprinted here for all my (less than 10, probably) subsrcibers.

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We all know—or at least have been told repeatedly— that we’re in a world that’s changing rapidly due to technology: while we don’t have flying cars quite yet, the ways in which we interact with the world have changed a great deal, even in the past few years.

Just how much has changed? Steve Portigal posted a link to Beloit College’s Class of 2011 Zeitgeist on his blog, and if it’s any indication, the answer is just about everything.

As of the Class of 2011, we live in a world where college students have:

• never rolled down a car window,
• always been able to slap mp3s up on MySpace or write on their friends’ Facebook walls,
• always had hi-definition television available,
• and always were able to fired of text messages back and forth.

In short, almost every interaction—designed or not—that I grew up with is a thing of the past. While growing up, I:

• always cranked down the window as fast as I could like it was some kind of game,
• never let my friends borrow any of my tapes (!) or CDs because I didn’t want them to get broken or scratched,
• never could get in any of the TV channels I wanted to watch without messing around with a set ofrabbit ears,
• and never really liked calling my friends on the phone to see if they wanted to play baseball in my backyard because you’d always get stuck with their mom or sister on the phone.

I’m not that far out of college, but I’m already far out of touch with college students. For product, service, and interaction designers like us, that’s kind of a scary challenge: we’re living in a world where the fundamental “laws” we build are thrown right out the window in a short span of years. For business owners, that’s even more daunting: how do young kids see your products and branding when they grew up in a completely different context than you did?

Here’s the real challenge for designers, developers, and business owners alike: we need to constantly and consistently keep creating new ideas, new products and services, and new ways to interact with those things we create before those old ways are already forgotten. As the Class of ‘11 can tell you, in today’s world, that’s happening faster than you think.

technorati tags:ifeelold, userexperience, ux, interactiondesign, ixd