01 Roadmaps, engagement groups and timelines

To understand the overall approach, I created a high-level roadmap for the campaign. Splitting it across time, makes it easier to digest for the team and lowers the mental resistance barrier which big project quite often suffer off.  This process also helps to identify neglected action points  and areas of ownership and responsibilities. In general I find a timeline or roadmap always handy. It splits actions into small chunks, easier to digest and more tactile. But most importantly, it gets the project rolling.

02 Ecosystem

With the overall brief “Use the suggested ambassadors to spread the word of the launch for the new BlackBerry” I started to identify the clients and ambassadors ecosystems, found connectors and merged them. The ecosystem offers stakeholders a common plattform and reference points which they can discuss. It also acts like an over-aching skeleton for the whole project. All stakeholders, form media planners to ATL, client and digital production, everybody recognises their areas of responsibility and input. During the production we called it the super-ecosystem of which we developed variations emphasising different areas and digging into more detail where necessary. More importantly, it gave the client a concrete reference point they could always get back to.

03 Creative ideas

With the brief in mind, the ecosystem in front of us and a good research into the ambassadors specific characteristics, UX and Creative started to work on some engaging and entertaining ideas. This is my favourite part!
And here is an extract of one of many ideas we came up with: Visualising story collaboration as a growing tree. An organic structure to hold content that can be experienced and read along many different paths or branches.

04 Highlevel structure

After a bit of towing and throwing and a lot of stakeholder ‘massaging’,  we were all happy with an approach which UX converted into a high-level structure.

05 Wires

By this time, all the touch points, timelines and consequently the evolution of the site was fully fleshed out.
The site had to accomodate 5 ambassadors of which 3 were defined and 2 still to be decided. Each ambassador was using different social media channels to engage with the audience, different media types the ambassadors collect as contribution and different engagement duration. The site had to be flexible in size and functionalities and had to work seamlessly across different devices. Although each ambassador had their own digital space and style, it should still feel like one campaign as part of the big Blackberry launch. The wires became the ‘handbook’ for design and tech throughout the production.

06 The final product

Till launch the design team had to work hard on the look and feel, a lot of tech meeting had to be called in, UATs had to be arranged and lists over lists of QAs had been generated. But eventually the site went live in time with Neil Gaiman’s Calendar of Tales with over 4000 images contributed in the first few days.

‘It is really easy and nice to navigate through the site’ Neil Gaiman

Enjoy!

01 Icons can say more then 1000 words.
When time is gold and space luxury I always like to consult the nounproject.

02 Typography is the new Iconography.
Always like to come back to feedly (specially tablet and phone) as an example for good typography use.
Useable – easy to read
Functional – supports structure and hierarchy
Desirable – shapes the design

03 Grey is the mother of all colours.
Who would have thought this would ever happen again after the interfaces from the dark digital ages! Workfu  and WTHR are one of many great examples in which grey is used as the backbone for a colourful interface.

04 Colours have purpose.
The idea, surely came from a thermostate when clear decided to use colours as an indicator for urgency

05 Filters are fun.
Call it user centric, filters, search…it all leads to the same thing: a happy user with result. See dribbble , fab or VW

06 Touch and go.
Seamless integration. Successful when unnoticed. Love the way how Zara app incorporated the e-commerce layer into the catalogue browsing experience of fashion  and how Gallery for everyone make upload and sharing a pleasure.

07 Anchors can work without water.
With all the endless scroll, even I have the need of anchoring sometimes to avoid drowning. Here are some effective anchor examples. The national honesty index or 360 langstrasse.

08 Metaphors are not dead.
Metaphors are like ‘guilty pleasures’. You do not want to admit, but when in use, it wakes up the child in you and makes you feel emotional and playful, enter the Exquisite forest and see for yourself.

09 Objects as interfaces.
Try the fridge magnet that can order pizza or the banana as a joystick. Once digitally connected they can do all sorts of magic.

10 Gif animation.
A classic example of ‘Good things never die’. So stick with it and enjoy gifctrl.com

+1 Freedom!!
Finally, just keep an eye on what happens here….

Hope there is something for everybody.
Enjoy the links.

Ubermore is working with Agency Republic on various new exiting projects, one of which has recently been launched as part of a rich-media, cross-platform campaign to promote Jack Daniels effort to support the UK music scene. The website follows music bands back to their hometown and documents their roots with short video clips, while inviting fans to join a competition to win tickets for their exclusive gig.

We brainstormed lots of user scenarios, but the client was locked into thinking that the mobile was primarily a business tool. The video focused on scheduling, travelling to meetings and making presentations, but we managed to drop-in some mobile behaviours that we thought would be common place in the future.

So what did we get right?

The scenarios maybe humourless, but they’re not a million miles away from the Siri launch videos.

What did we get wrong?

• A Leviathan scroll wheel menu rather than multi-touch
• Applications extending functionality
• Video working well over 3G (… but sold as a key speed benefit during the spectrum auction!)

The Intelligence Assumption

Our basic assumption in the video prototype was that the phone would act like a concierge or human-like assistant.  After hearing Matt Jones talk at the “In Progress” event, (staged by ‘It’s Nice That‘ magazine) maybe that premise is a promise too far. Maybe it is wiser to aim for experiences that connect robots and autonomous services in a way that engineers simpler emotional empathy rather than human-like intelligence. Examples of these types of not-so intelligent connectors to the real world are Little Printer, the learning thermostat and Cryoscope haptic forecaster.

Siri is still in Beta

However, a voice interface does provide the seductive potential to expose and unify services. Outside of America Siri is breaks easily.

Siri is hopelessly crippled for most of the world because it cannot link to maps, directions or local search. The disappointment felt is really similar to the feeling at the first iphone launch.  Jobs said Apple would never allow third parties to develop for the iphone.  There were a few bundled apps, and many of these, particularly messaging, had many flaws. AS history played out, the iphone’s most powerful differentiator is the application ecosystem.

Siri is the ‘doing’ ecosystem

Perhaps ‘Siri’ is distined to become  a new type of ecosystem that lets you command your phone  to ‘do’. There will be an API, where  businesses and brands will have a way of directly interfacing and extending  into the underlying lexicon, actions and  language. Interflora may have an app, but it’s far more interesting to be able to act upon the verbal question “Send my Girlfriend some flowers tomorrow”. Siri could become a doorway to a mirade of actions and third party datasets. This is already appearing in a range of ‘cracked’ usefulness.

Google must see the same thing, and many observers think this is the reason for recent unification of Google privacy polices. Currently in development, Majel will make it possible to offer the whole spectrum of Google’s confusing array of services via voice on android.

Will Siri get good enough?

The real question is whether Siri will actually succeed. It’s bad enough to make you just give up. Sending the voice recording to the cloud for interpretation introduces a very annoying lag.  It has a very high error rate. Even the activation gesture of raising the phone to your ear doesn’t work reliably. On top of these usability issues, there is a human reality that, for some reason, it’s really embarrassing to dictate misunderstood commands to your phone. It took my whole walk from the British Film institute to the millennium foot bridge to successfully dictate one SMS message.

I believe these usability problems will be solved in time, and linking third party services to pet-like ‘intelligence’ in the cloud will transform the perceived usefulness beyond dictation. If I were to make another mobile ‘future’ video today, I’d focus on the ‘Internet of things‘ and how the mobile works with the cloud of semi-intelligent connected objects that will fill our future lives.

Earlier this year, the ubermore team helped The Mill kick starting a concept for a massive online game for the hi-tech cambridge-based company Redgate. With strategy, UX and engagement ideas, we helped shape and sell-in the project. A lot of workshops, game structures scams and research were part of our contribution.
Three weeks into the campaign and it already has a core player group of 10 K. Beat that!

Under the hood, the campaign is a mini-ecosystem that run itself majorly reducing the cost of this long running engagement campaign. Particularly beautiful are the series of campaign films.

OK, OK…with the price draw of winning a trip into space… still this whole campaign is aimed to an audience you probably never have heard off: DBA’s.
Well, we didn’t before started working on this campaign.
See you in space.

When Ubermore works uber-more, we create little characters playing around with our technology, exploring geo location, NFC and augmented reality in a car. Hopefully, very soon we can publish our first demo clips.

SoMoLo = Social + Mobile + Location

We’re looking at how characters triggered by environments can join fuse the digital and physical worlds to provide stories and play.

When LBI was a partner for the launch of Brand Republic’s Hall of Fame, held at the Altitude 360 venue at the top of Millbank overlooking London. They were looking for some quick ideas to make their presence known to the guests. So they asked us to come up with some heroic thinking in just  2 days!

LBi have a new positioning around blending –  they “blend the best-in-class strategy, creativity and technology across multiple channels to move your business forward.” The result is a bit of magic, symbolised by a Unicorn.

Since there was no way around the Unicorn and only five days to go, we grabbed the beast by its tail horn, mixed it up with some more magical creatures and came up with a ‘blending’ flip book…and a range of supporting print and screen stuff.

Thanks to ace producer Debbie Lee and all the team for turning all the production around so fast.

Ubermore is a regular at Digitlondon during 2011, working on several exciting projects…from nifty booking services to smooth data visualization, social media online games or quirky storyboards to capture new digital ideas for a big beverage company. Having a great time!

Unfortunately, none is live yet and all is VERY secret.

Ubermore teamed up again with Laura Bambach, ECD at Lbi, and her crew.  A creative pitch to develop a campaign & media strategy celebrating the track record of ‘continues change’ and innovation over the last 25 years for a major financial institution. Inspired by Troika, Microsoft Kinect and stop-frame animation we developed a cross-media campaign that sold their story in an engaging, interactive and compelling way.\

UPDATE! 04 August 2011

“Barclays appointed LBi, Profero and SapientNitro to a new global digital roster for its Wealth, Corporate and Capital divisions after a review process aimed at reducing the number of its agencies. The three digital agencies will handle projects for Barclays’ non-consumer divisions after a pitch process that saw ten shops compete for a place on the roster. Barclays previously used 26 agencies across the three businesses.”

See the Campaign article