The recent cyclone in Myanmar and earthquake in China have given rise to a whole new way of giving in the non-profit sector:

Starting today, customers of Verizon Wireless in the U.S. can donate to a charity called “Save the Children,” who has mobilized in this time of crisis to provide lifesaving assistance in these two affected regions. Verizon customers can text to the address 4SAVE (47283) with the keyword “quake” to contribute to earthquake relief or the key word “cyclone” to contribute to cyclone relief. They will then receive a reply asking them to confirm their donation of $5.00, which will appear on their next monthly bill.

Definitely a potential game changer.  I wonder if we should start developing for the iPhone?

The original article’s on ReadWriteWeb.

Accessibility isn’t an easy thing to address. What with all the different codes and standards out there, our team is left wondering: how accessible do we have to be? And what does it mean to be “accessible” anyway?

Good free resource online. Description:

Accessibility is designing products so that people with disabilities can use them. Accessibility makes user interfaces perceivable, operable, and understandable by people with a wide range of abilities, and people in a wide range of circumstances, environments, and conditions.

The whole book, Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design, is online. Valuable stuff.

There’s plenty of best practices out there when it comes to design. Furthermore, there’s plenty of advice and warnings. Everyone’s got their view, and everyone’s got an opinion. Research is done, and then the conclusions are drawn and applications are generalized and universalized and disseminated to the waiting design community.

This, however, is not to say there isn’t some good stuff out there. Good stuff, when found, should be treasured and an evaluation made as to whether or not its counsel has been observed in our product.  When the counsel sheds prescriptive light on what we ought to do, then it’s our team’s job to start moving the UI in that direction when the opportunities present themselves.

Ultimately, however, each application and website is different. They have different purposes, and their applications accomplish different measurable goals and serve different audiences. The ultimate test, no matter the number of studies and research and best practices out there, is simple: usability tests with real clients and users on our application. It’s not even about what our clients or users say… it’s what they do. That’s why observation is so important: what do they actually do?  What are they clicking on?  Where are they making mistakes and clicking on the back button?

We’re working on a project these days with a different front-end implementation than other parts of our product. It’s been exciting to work on, and both developers and our Usability Team are jazzed about it, not just about the project itself, but what it can lead to in other parts of our product. That future focus is cool, and combined with some of the best practices and research out there, as well as validation by usability tests, things are looking and feeling pretty good this Friday.

The lack of blog postings here has been, unfortunately, a product of our inattentiveness to writing, as well as a focused effort from the inside to consider our approach to the Convio UI. More recently, however, the number of projects has swelled and our attentions and time have been consistently applied to some exciting stuff–kind of feels like running after a train heading out of the station. It’s even more difficult when that train is one of those speedy bullet ones.

Going back to that “focused effort” at thinking about our approach to the Convio UI: We’ve recently sat down as a Products team to think about where we’re going. Idealistic designers (like this one) have always imagined design to be a top-down application of theory on a needy product. Imagine the unveiling of the iPod on the mp3 player world 6 years ago. It wasn’t merely an improvement to mp3 players. It was a fundamental design move that was revolutionary. Take Microsoft Office as another example: the MS Office team wasn’t simply adding a new feature here and there, as they did for Office 3.0, 4.0, 95, 97, 2000, XP, 2003… When they unveiled Office 2007’s Ribbon UI, they scrapped the old paradigm and put on a new hat. They did the dreaded R word: redesign. They applied a top-down change to the UI. You can argue the success or failure of Microsoft’s approach, but a couple things you can say: it was gutsy and boy, did that take a lot of time and resources.

Are we ready for a top-down change to the Convio UI? Probably not, which is not to say some people aren’t advocating for it. But given the resources we have, the calendar time available, and the number of cool things we want to do, let’s go for a bottoms-up approach. Get easy wins extant in the product on a rolling, consistent basis; structure our team to tackle each project that comes to the table; get some standards in place that can guide both our team moving forward and that can be applied retroactively to UI already in the product, and leave the top-down UI change for another battle.

That sounds good to me. And while it’s an approach that falls short of the design-fiend idealism of introducing worldwide change all at one time, it’s a boundary that, once accepted, will hopefully allow for some innovative, substantive stuff. And that’s a hopeful note to start on as we move into the new year.

Facebook’s all the rage these days, and for good reason.  When Microsoft hand-waved $10 billion for the online social network application last week, one couldn’t help but notice that $10 billion is quite a significant bump from Yahoo’s $1 billion a mere year ago.  Whether or not one agrees with the $10 billion valuation, it’s hard not to be impressed with Facebook.  It’s far and away the number one site visited by college students, and from the perspective of a web junkie sitting right outside the UC Berkeley campus and its attendant dorms, “Facebooking” isn’t just an urban slang term, but a fact of life, gaining on email as the primary form of communication between friends, and not merely a social media and networking company, but–with the 4000+ third-party applications developed–an increasingly serious technology platform.

Dave McClure recently outlined a Facebook strategy for businesses on Techcrunch, and some statistics he throws up are horribly intriguing:

Over half of Facebook’s 43 million users visit every day, spend an average of 20 minutes on the site, and view over 54 billion total page views per month.

In a few short months Facebook has quickly become one of the most impressive user acquisition channels on the web, rivaling SEO & SEM strategies for priority with new startups. Over 60 Facebook applications have more than 1 million total users, and over 40 have at least 100,000 daily users.

Whether you’re a business, a 2-man startup, or a non-profit, “the most impressive user acquisition channel on the web” is going to be interesting stuff.  After all, we’re into our users.  How do we get connected to them?  How can we get an influx of new users and adopters?  How can we engage them so they’re spending an average of 20 minutes on the site everyday?  McClure outlines 7 things to consider when graphing your Facebook strategy.  It’s a great introduction to Facebook for those who aren’t yet savvy, and it’s great advice for those of us trying to get our heads around the potential value Facebook might hold for our organization.  One thing to note: it’s not enough to simply “get on” Facebook.  How you do it and what you do once you jump onboard are absolutely important.  Hence, the need for a strategy.

Stay with me for just a moment before running off to read McClure’s essential primer.  For college students, Facebooking’s their way of connecting not only with their own social network, but a means of making new ones.  More importantly, and more applicably, it’s one of their ways of tapping into their friends’ interests that they would never have tapped into otherwise.  So the question facing application developers and non-profits is: how can I make sure my interest/application/presence stays on a user’s Facebook profile long enough (and prominently enough) to experience some of that viral distribution?

That’s the hard one.

With over 4000 applications swirling in the Facebook maelstrom, and more being added everyday, what hope do we have of finding traction?  I’ve heard college students say, “It was cool in the beginning, but I turned it off after a while,” meaning all those applications soon turned into mere inundation.  Watching college students pick up applications, it’s sometimes surprising to see them drop the applications just as easily, often within the same day, or even the same hour.  How to make an application or presence on Facebook sticky?  I’d refer a reader to McClure’s last point: using virtual currency to move a new user from bystander to citizen.  It’s the same problem non-profits face: how do I move someone from signed-up member to activist and eventually, donor?

X me and Superpoke! are two of the top ten applications on Facebook.  What they have going for them is a virtual interaction that is immediately accessible after the application is added: hug, poke, kiss, love, punch.  It’s a low threshold actionable item for a user to immediately engage the application and–more importantly–to engage others. Virtual gifts also provide the same social interaction.

What I’m trying to say with all this is that getting onto Facebook is a first step.  But it needs to be accompanied immediately by a bunch of other steps: actionable items coupled with opportunities to find more information, and a virtual interaction of some sort that engages or stimulates interest and catalyzes Facebook’s viral potential.  And thinking of these steps all together at the same time constitutes the sort of strategy we’re going to need to be successful.

There’s a first time for everything: first date, first job, first car, first house, and the list goes on. I suppose there’s got to be a first even for our Usability & Design team, and by this I mean, our first post on our first blog. At this point, some affirmation in the form of encouragement would be in order here as we throw out ideas and opinions for public consumption, but seeing as how this is digital space, stunned silence will have to do. Indifferent silence, maybe.

So what’s with the blog? Authoring a design blog isn’t a presumption that we’re in a position of authority when it comes to design. It’s not to say we have a pedigree or portfolio of work we’re out to crow about neither. If anything, our design blog is a blog by people, designers by day, working on a product for which we have a lot of ideas, goals, and dreams: stuff we want to do when it comes to design, feel, and UI. It has to do with usability, CSS, colors, endless AJAX library debates, standards compliance, some more nerdy stuff and some stuff that’s just plain nifty.

We’re an odd bunch. “Yoo-dee-ers” – they call us. Most of us here come from a traditional computer science background (oh, code is bliss) and picked up an artsy bent along the way (the guy leading our team got the MFA, and Abe’s on his way to get one too). We’re iPhone admirers; 37signals readers; 9rules browsers; shrug our shoulders at Techcrunch, Digg, Popurls, Original Signal, and Reddit; social networking and web 2.0 connoisseurs trying to get our heads around how we’re going to put it on the table for our clients and world to make it part of their daily fare.

So we’ll talk about design, things we’re thinking and reading. We’ll throw out our discussions as we’re doing our jobs and see what you have to say. Screenshots maybe, the newest UI element, some technology stumbled upon, designs that inspire us. Musings will shy away from the philosophical, and might even veer towards the architectural (which was this poor guy’s major in college).

Maybe something more concrete than this intro stuff is in order here. Usability is an area of the product which has received short shrift a little too much in the past in an otherwise really robust application. “Usability” isn’t just a buzzword for 2007. It’s a reality we care about and our work’s sharply focused on making it happen. How’s this UD team actually going to do it? We say, subscribe to the feed and let’s figure it out.