We witness it when football players take ballet. We see it when a furniture designer looks to nature for inspiration. We hear it when Tony Bennett teams up with Lady Gaga.

Unfortunately, we don’t witness this in the digital world enough. Instead of being open to a range of influences, site design processes often have a narrow focus that can result in  “me too” looks rather than differentiated designs.

How does this happen?

As part of the discovery process, companies typically limit their review of the digital landscape to direct competitors and “top sites.”  This practice is important for benchmarking and informing feature prioritization. But done alone, a competitive review can be limiting and inadvertently create a “keeping up with the joneses” effect rather than setting the stage for a differentiated experience.

How can you avoid this pitfall and create a more differentiated experience?

By expanding your circle of influence. By supplementing competitive reviews with brand spheres.

What Is A Brand Sphere?

A brand sphere is a map of your customers’  “go to” brands across verticals. It identifies the brands they choose as they go about their day and the brands you can find in their home.

What is in their refrigerator? Which labels do they wear? What car do they drive? What kind of phone do they have? Where do they eat out? Which gym do they belong to? Which hair and body care brands do they prefer?

A brand sphere draws a more complete picture of your customer. It illuminates their preferences and expectations. And it provides new fodder for inspiration.

For example, if you are designing a consumer electronics shopping site, why limit your influences to only other electronics sites or even ecommerce sites in general? Why not look at music and video sites where your consumers most likely spend more time? Why not look at the CPG sites that fall in their brand sphere? What can you learn from the news sites they visit? The social networks they use?

By looking across verticals, you will expose yourself to different design approaches and feature sets. The purpose is not to imitate these approaches but to take a step back and see if there are any distinct designs or features that spark an idea.

Undoubtedly new perspectives will fuel new ideas. Ideas that are as elegant and powerful as a football player who can both rush and plié.

The conference focused on designing for multiple screens, the intersection of design and technology, pushing the envelope of user experience, and to bring new, visionary energy to our work. Five very full days of labs, seminars, and sessions provided ample opportunity to learn from the experts, and I am honored to have been invited back to speak in two sessions.

On Tuesday, October 4 I spoke to nearly 170 people about “Making Better Design Decisions by Understanding How People Think.” We discussed how to turn merely adequate experiences on the web into more meaningful ones. People often complete tasks despite the fact that many interfaces seem intent on thwarting us; understanding how people perceive, think, learn, and remember can help us make better design decisions. During the session we identified common UX problems, discussed how people actually think, and showed how to modify the design options (in real-time!) to craft a better user experience.

Also on Tuesday I was a member of a panel discussion organized by the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) where we talked specifically about how we leverage the Adobe design and development tools in our day-to-day workflow and processes. Fluid was able to show some of our ground-breaking recent and upcoming work, and the attendees asked great questions about our design, prototyping, and development process. I showed work from the same projects featured in the keynote address, and many people recognized it and were excited to see it in more detail and learn about we brought these innovative customer experiences to life.

On Wednesday, October 5 I spoke to about 70 people about how we use some of our design tools at Fluid on the Experience Design team in my “I Didn’t Know Fireworks Could Do That!” session. We explored some of the lesser known yet powerful features of Adobe Fireworks, an essential design tool that operates with both vectors and bitmaps and can span the design process from wireframe to comp. I showed how we use Fireworks with Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, and Flash Catalyst, as an integral part of our design and development workflow.

Finally, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the talented folks at Nerd Radio and talked with them for about 20 minutes about our work at Fluid, our workflow, and about the exciting new announcements from our interactive merchandising products team that we have begun to launch the latest updates that enable consistent and excellent customer experiences across multiple screens and devices – precisely the core theme of the Adobe MAX 2011 conference!

Overall, the conference was a great success. My sessions were well-received, Fluid’s work was showcased in front of thousands of attendees, and I had the opportunity to meet and speak personally with dozens of talented designers and developers from around the world. Now it’s time to start thinking about and preparing for the Adobe MAX 2012 conference next October!

Our mission for Fluid Experience has always been to make online shopping more engaging while decreasing production effort. With this in mind, we’re pleased to announce enhancements that optimize product and brand imagery presentation, regardless of the device. We accomplish this using a number of methods:

Product Displays - Our interactive product displays (zoom, color changes, views, etc.) now perform browser detection and serve up a Flash-based presentation if available. If not, we assume the user is on a touch-based tablet or smart phone and serve up an HTML presentation specifically optimized for touch navigation. For zoom, instead of forcing click-and-pan or mouse-over zoom gestures on the user, we rely on native pinch-to-zoom gestures that they already know. Plus, we do some special work behind the scenes to ensure the image stays crisp, even at multiple levels of zoom.

Shoppable Imagery – For adding interactivity to brand-based imagery, we’ve built a completely new, HTML-based component from the ground up. And don’t worry — ditching Flash doesn’t mean a loss in richness or interactivity. Our new Shoppable Image component allows for graceful crossfade and scrolling transitions. Hotspots and tooltips can contain and mix images and text. Rich fonts work out-of-the-box courtesy of Typekit. Fonts.com support is available as well.

Shoppable Video – Our Shoppable Video component detects user’s system in a similar way to Product Displays and serves up either a Flash or HTML-based presentation as appropriate.

And this is just the beginning: we see huge potential in how tablets and smart phones can really elevate the shopping experience and intend to continue to further optimize our components going into 2012. What’s more, we’ve expanded browser support so retailers can continue to upload an image once and rest assured that Fluid Experience will keep pace with the proliferation of new devices. Now and in the future.

Designing Search opens strong, dolling out clear, actionable insights into search habits of users that are of immediate value to anyone designing search features for a site. Starting from what he describes as “zero” (a search results page with no matches found), Nudelman gives wonderful insight into how to construct search functionality that maximizes the discoverability of products and to help customers find what they are looking for. Nudelman deftly justifies his assertions with examples drawn from his considerable time observing users’ behavior. Nudelman even touches briefly on the topic of social search, though he offers little more on the topic that to proclaim it fertile ground for research.

Bravely, Nudelman attempts to address problems associated with mobile design, largely abandoning his central topic altogether and instead focusing on common problems he has observed in users. Though none of his observations are surprising to those of us who have worked closely with and observed actual users, they do serve as a great primer for anyone new to designing for a mobile platform. Nudelman suggests how best to improve upon the current design patterns, advocating for the adoption of less obtrusive design patterns for mobile experiences. While his solutions are in many ways an improvement over current patterns, designers need to consider if the potential improvement is greater than the costs associated with the adoption of a new design pattern. In some cases, improvements may only be incremental and change may result in disruption and rejection.

In contrast, Nudelman’s take on design for the iPad is spot on. Like his section on mobile, his discussion on designing for tablets is only loosely tied to the topic of search, but unlike mobile, Nudelman is completely on point. He addresses everything from current use cases and ergonomics (largely refuting Kevin Kelly’s vision of the future in which everyone carries a phone and a tablet), to future and innovative uses for the newborn platform. Anyone new to designing for tablets would do well to pick up a copy for that section alone.

Overall, Designing Search is a worthwhile read that occasionally shifts focus from search to include much broader topics and audiences. Nudelman has written Designing Search as much for interaction designers as for project managers and executives, and at times he offers insights into details interesting and familiar to designers, such as explaining eye tracking methods. Even with the occasional digression, Nudelman provides sufficient guidance into designing search and mobile experiences to make Designing Search a worthwhile reference.

The borders between physical and digital are further being blurred as traditional brick and mortar retailers are laying stake in the digital space. Mobile computing is nearly ubiquitous and instant access to information is almost at everyone’s fingertips. In addition, the attention span of people have become shorter and this poses a challenge to brands. Brand consistency is key to communicating to your target audience and in today’s fast paced retail environment, there’s no room for error. A marketing message that runs astray can have a huge impact on business.

During our outing, we’ve noticed many retailers doing great things with new technologies and some not so great. There has been a recent trend with stores using tablet computers to allow their consumers to browse through their product catalogue within store. It’s a static and passive experience that most of the time, does not engage the customer. Some of the problems with this technology are:

• The technology does not tell you where to find items in store.
  
• Proper QA testing of the app wasn’t performed. The app crashed many times while browsing.
  
• It may not be inline with your brand aesthetic. If your brand has a gritty, industrial feel to it, placing modern, shiny tablets throughout the store takes away from the overall brand experience.
• While the “cool” factor may be there the fact of the matter is that it can alienate the consumer, especially in tablet form.
• You cannot replace good old customer service with shiny tablet device. There is no substitution for face to face human interaction.
  
• Instead of focusing on the products in the store, your consumers are fixated with trying to figure out how to navigate through a mobile experience.
  

To conclude, always keep the end user in mind when designing an experience and remember that he/she comes first and the technology follows. With new technologies being released daily, it’s easy to lose sight of who you’re designing for. As Experience Designers it is our responsibility to make the transition from physical to digital as seamless as possible for users and the focus should be getting to know the end user and their technological needs and wants and then finding the technology that suits them. The tablet computer will not be the the answer to elevate your brand and increase conversion and raise customer satisfaction. There is one trait that successful brands all have in common:  Their solid dedication to Customer Service. When designing, think of ways to design user experiences that enhance customer service and engagement.

The simple fact is that lifestyle imagery is engaging and fun: just look at the stack of Williams-Sonoma or Patagonia catalogs on the average consumer’s coffee table. However, turning that imagery into something web-ready by adding copy takes too much time and specialized resources (designers) and might even detract from the imagery itself. This is disappointing because as in the offline world, vivid imagery is engaging and can both build brand and increase the chance a customer will buy that item.

Fluid Experience to the rescue…

The shoppable lifestyle imagery component of Fluid Experience allows business users to add helpful tooltips to images so your customers can find what they want more quickly. The functionality is templatized so you can preconfigure brand appropriate fonts, colors, styles, etc.  allowing your designers to rest easy knowing business-types won’t meddle with their design. Once the banner is created, it can be previewed and then deployed to your site right from the Fluid Retail admin tools allowing you to push new banners live in less than five minutes.

What’s more, you can omit tooltips and add arbitrary links to various calls-to-action throughout the banner. Finally, you can place multiple banners into a merchandiser which allows users to navigate through elegant cross-fading or scrolling.

Satisfy your user’s need for interactivity and make better use of your brand imagery. Contact support@fluidretail.com to learn more about shoppable lifestyle imagery today.

Unless you’ve been putting in time at a mountain monastery, you’ve heard about Google Instant: Google’s innovation launched yesterday to deliver real-time search results as you type keywords in the search box.

Much of the buzz has been around efficiency – getting better results faster. For digital retailers, I think the bigger significance is that Google Instant has transformed search into a great shopping jumping off point.

Searching is now browsing.

The experience Google Instant delivers is very similar to guided browsing (i.e. parametric filters) that you see often on ecommerce catalog pages like this one for The North Face. The consumer doesn’t have to know exactly what they want – they can simply select from a list and the site responds to their interests. It’s an iterative experience.

Like everyone else, I want a cashmere camel coat. In the screenshots above, you see that I get relevant shopping results at “camel cashm…” and can then easily browse between sweaters, coats, cardigans and scarves with the results visually updating real-time.

Google Instant will eventually come to Google Shopping.

It’s very significant that “Shopping” is in the primary navigation at top, prominently featured in the left navigation, and a link in the search results (e.g. “Shopping results for camel cashmere cardigan”). You can absolutely count on Google bringing the Instant capability to their Shopping tab, equipping consumers with shopping filters, view/sort controls, and taking the experience one step closer to a full shopping experience completely outside of retailers’ websites.

Portable content + SEO considerations.

What this means for digital retailers is two things at first glance: 1) increasing the quality and portability of your content, and 2) reviewing your SEO strategy in light of Google’s shift. I don’t have “how-to” answers for the above (yet) – there are many great conversations going on right now and what it means, ranging from recommendations that brands refocus on core/root keywords to povs that seo is now irrelevant because “no one will see the same web anymore, making optimizing it virtually impossible.”

What I know for certain is that digital consumers want the experience that Google is making a reality. Savvy brands and retailers will take advantage of it.

The title’s a lie. I love Gilt and have no intention of giving it up completely (even though the private sales aren’t private and they seem to selling every brand under the sun). But I did tire of receiving 1-2 emails every day and finally pulled the trigger and unsubscribed.

Treating customer service interactions as new opportunities to engage.

Gilt really gets digital customer experience. Instead of offering the usual insincere apologies, they deliver a beautifully designed ‘unsubscribe’ screen with an unapologetic “How can I help?” attitude that puts the consumer in control and makes them like Gilt more as a result. It’s very easy to choose “reduce the number of emails I receive” rather than severing the relationship completely.

Offering ways to connect on other channels / devices.

Better yet is that Gilt takes this opportunity to showcase other ways to connect that might fit better than email with one’s digital lifestyle, including the innovative desktop app Gilt Clock with a sale countdown timer, preview of upcoming sales and a link to the calendar. It’s not a leap to imagine them successfully promoting their mobile / iPad apps here as well. (Note: I took the screenshot above a month or so ago so they may already do this.)

I conducted a quick survey of other retailers’ ‘unsubscribe’ experiences. Most were purely transactional and forced the consumer to choose between ending their relationship with the brand or resigning themselves to the status quo (nobody wins in this scenario).

This is another example of the pure play retailers reinventing the details that traditional retailers might accept as established best practices. I think consumers appreciate it and suspect Gilt sees a return from the effort.

When we think about great real world shopping experiences, there is a common theme to every flagship store and back alley pop-up shop: excellent product presentation. In the offline world, it’s guaranteed that there will be a real live product to pick up, inspect and share. You need only watch shoppers in a average apparel store to see how picking up an item, holding it up and glancing in the mirror creates an emotional attachment.

This simple act is so basic in the offline world that it’s too easy to overlook when envisioning the online experience. While best practices dictate things like the Add to Cart button being above the fold and intuitive search and browse functionality, it’s important not to lose sight of the basics:

Outstanding product presentation is a ticket to the game. Without it, consumers are may look elsewhere for this emotional attachment.

Scene 7 was kind enough to validate this philosophy in their recent “What Shoppers Want” survey. The Cliff’s Notes version is this:  shoppers want rich, vivid product imagery and the ability to browse views and colors and zoom in with simple mouse over actions. Clicking is too much work.  They want to “go big” and inspect every last detail of the product with minimal effort,  just as they would in the offline world.

At Fluid, we designed Fluid Experience from the ground up to produce rich, easy-to-use product displays that are unparalleled in the e-commerce landscape. Almost as important, we made them incredibly simple to build and change so you can experiment and find out what delights your customers.

In the spirit of going big, we took a few minutes to put together a demo that does just that. Simple mouse movements change views and expose zoom. Plus you can click View Larger for even greater detail and zoom. We think you’ll agree that it’s difficult to go back to just an average product image.

It seems like you can’t open The New York Times lately without seeing Vic Gundotra touting Google’s latest innovation or acquisition (disclosure: Fluid worked with Vic when he was at Microsoft — we’re fans).

In addition to Google dominating all-things-mobile, some recent significant announcements:

•    Goggles
•    Acquiring Yelp (almost)
•    Selling direct to consumer (beginning with the Nexus One)
•    Real-time search

Any of the above looked at individually are significant and innovative but not a game changer in their own right.

But when you look at them as a coordinated whole, what begins to emerge is that Google is assembling a new breed of multi-channel ecommerce platform with the potential to deliver consumers a complete shopping experience without ever needing to interact with a retailer’s website, app or social presence.

Whether this is master plan or strategic by-product is up for discussion. But add to the above list the foundation that Google already has put in place:

•    Search UPC codes
•    Shop Savvy
•    Package tracking
•    Google Checkout
•    Google Analytics
•    Catalogs
•    My Shopping List, Gallery View, parametric filtering, etc. etc.

It’s an easy leap to envision this scenario:

A consumer searches Google for “spring trenchcoat belt.” Google returns her a product grid of trenchcoats in interactive merchandising displays allowing for zoom and multiple views across a range of brands. More interesting is tagged user-generated content (e.g. my colleague Vanessa’s twitpic of herself trying on a red Ledstone Trench at Burberry on Spring Street). Real-time results deliver relevant posts/tweets from other similarly focused shoppers. User reviews (courtesy of Yelp or similar) deliver a trove of ratings and geo-located user opinions including the best places to buy online and the best local stores in your area.

Sound familiar? Sounds like your ecommerce site except with more choice, more functionality, and more options making it better for the consumer. Sounds like a pretty awesome digital shopping experience to me – one that decidedly shifts the balance of power to the consumer and turbo-enables the digital shopping patterns we all saw emerge this holiday.

Perhaps most interesting is that Google is not bound to the need to convert. Instead, they benefit most by embracing a new paradigm of the shopping funnel as a non-linear, cross-brand, multi-branched journey. What makes this so powerful is that this is what consumers want and, most often, is in opposition to what individual retailers want to control.

The scenarios get more interesting and paradigm-bending:

• Find the perfect chair while browsing a home design magazine in airport lounge at JFK  >  use Goggles to identify the product  >  mobile search for best prices online + local availability in Seattle  >  share my shopping list to my wife who goes to see them in person and buys from our local design store.

• A Patagonia brand loyalist is shopping in a Patagonia store  >  decides on the jacket he wants but wants to make sure he isn’t overpaying  >  mobile UPC search returns not only best prices but comparable jackets from other outdoor brands  >  even more relevant is the user-generated content, specifically one outdoor enthusiast’s tweet linking to a mobile video where he demonstrates the advantages of The North Face Mercurial Jacket  >  former brand loyalist is now comparison shopping.

There are many more scenarios, all plausible, readily possible and direct outgrowths of consumer behavior patterns that are already happening (brands and retailers are catching up).

The most interesting thing here is that consumers are driving this. They want this new shopping paradigm to fuel their rapidly evolving digital lifestyles. Google’s genius is their relentless commitment to a user-centric strategy and ultimately leading consumers to a vision of their own creation.