http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/agency-year-akqa-137015

I’ve been working on something for a long time, and finally got around to making it happen.

Freshly is a way to find out what farmers’ market is near you, open, now. It’s driven by trying to remember when the markets are open, and where they are on which days. I wanted something that would keep me out of the supermarket when I just wanted to pick something up on the way home.

I’ve started with three cities I know well, New York, Toronto, and San Francisco. All the market information has been gathered by me now, but future markets can be added by anyone. At a glance you can see the markets nearby, and show what’s open now, tomorrow, or in the next week.

In the immediate future as I beta test, I want to get Freshly mobile optimized, then start expanding the offering including showing what’s in season at each market, and hopefully getting to the point where the farmers’ who will be at a market can show what they’re bringing that day. I’m very happy to have got to this point, thanks to the developer Chris Casciano.

Sign up and I’ll let you know when you can use Freshly www.shopfreshly.com

Some of the most misguided attempts have been QR codes on billboards by highways, or on moving buses. It seems like there wasn’t even any thought put into the usability of those codes.

This isn’t just another blog post complaining about their use though, I just want to make a quick point about where they are still valuable: where the general public doesn’t have to touch them.

Think in-app airline ticketing, a quick scan of the phone as you board. Mobile coupons, no more clipping paper. Any time someone needs to convey information from device to a store we can still use QR codes, and it still makes sense, and it can still make the end-user’s life easier. To state it more simply, never make your user have to interact with a QR code.

Let’s not make QR codes all bad, let’s remember that technology needs to be used appropriately.

Maybe a little backstory.

When the iPhone was first released, I was in the process of moving to San Francisco. The second day I was there, I stopped by an Apple store, picked up this amazing phone and my mobile experience was changed forever.

A couple years later, I was still using the same phone, that first generation iPhone. It worked great, though I had to jailbreak it when I moved to Canada. The 3G came out, then the 3GS, then the 4G, and I was still using that great iPhone. Eventually Google released Android, then the Nexus One, a phone I like to call “the greatest phone ever made behind the iPhone”.

Because I work in mobile, and a very large percentage of mobile users are on Android devices, I decided to jump on the Android bandwagon and order that Nexus One from Google. I was excited about it, and it worked well when I was excited. Once the shine wore off, the imperfections started to stand out to me.

Almost immediately I started to get dust under the screen, an annoyance only surpassed by the fact I couldn’t see the screen in sunlight. I could see my iphone screen. It didn’t get any dust in it either. This was really a small thing, although the longer I dealt with it the more it began to escalate from annoyance level to anger.

What really got to me was the design. This is my career, my livelihood, and my love. With my iPhone, things flowed seamlessly from one app to another, and I never had to learn a new way to work. With Android, I never knew what I was going to get. Some included the menu in the app, some were under the menu button. Some used the back button in app, some back buttons sent me to the home page, some to the last app I used. To make this more frustrating, when I tried to tap that back button, it’s hit area was higher than the label, something I’m told is known but has never been fixed.

A few months ago I started thinking about the iPhone 5. I knew it was coming, so I wanted to hold off on replacing my increasingly more frustrating Nexus One, which had started giving me “out of memory” errors, no matter how much I deleted. I heard it was going to be August, no problem, I can make it. Then September, damn, a little long. Now I’m hearing October and I can’t do it, I was too pumped up about a new iPhone, especially since I had been leering at my wife’s iPhone 4 for 5 months at this point.

So I stole my kid’s phone. She’s got my Nexus One, I’ve for a 3.something iOS first gen iPhone, which besides the lack of GPS, has been far better than my latest Android experience.

For the next couple of months I will keep going with this archaic iPhone, and I’m happier about that than I have been for the last year and a half of Android. I’ll keep the Android around, I need to test, I need to understand what’s happening over there, but I can’t do it every day anymore. I can’t keep setting design aside anymore.

I’ve missed you, iPhone, and I’m looking forward to version 5.

MDC partners has posted on their blog about the Reader function of mobile Safari, and are making it seem as if advertising will cease to exist.

So what exactly is Reader?

In a nutshell: Reader is a feature that allows users of the Safari mobile browser to prevent advertisements from being displayed in the news stories they read.

It’s actually a little more than that, Reader strips all formatting from the article, presenting the content as plain text on a page. It’s a great way to consume content, particularly long form text found in lengthy news articles. It’s not designed to prevent ads, ads are just one of the things that are distracting readers from their goal.

Their goal on a news site is to read the news, to consume content. The point of ads is to distract the reader in order to inform them of a service or product. These are opposing forces, with the advertisers trying to break the flow of the reader’s original intention. Readers aren’t going to a news site to look at ads, they aren’t seeking information about a product, the advertising has always been a necessary evil in order to pay for the production of that news. In the past, readers have just ignored ads, as shown by the abysmal click through rates. To fight this banner blindness, advertisers started to make their ads gaudy and aggressive -including actually blocking the content- so ad blockers became popular. Reader is the next evolution of this active aggression against ads, but also it’s an attempt to avoid over-designed content.

I make my living creating advertising, but my reaction to Reader is not that my livelihood is disappearing, instead I think this is a step forward in our evolution.

Banner ads were a reaction. They were news sites reacting to having a website for the first time, and seeing it as if the internet were paper, where ads covered the costs and made tons of money. They were a reaction from us advertising people saying we’ll handle ads the same way we did in newspapers except now we can make them move. The problem is, it was the wrong reaction, from both of us.

For the most part, we’ve failed to innovate, and have kept going with banner ads though the results were never extraordinary. Now it’s time that we look at ads in a different way. How can we get our message to consumers in a way that is useful, an experience, even delightful?

It’s time for us to stop complaining about the ad blockers, and start thinking about new ways to have a conversation.

http://www.mdc-ideas.com/2011/06/10/apple%E2%80%99s-new-mobile-browser-a-threat-to-online-adverting/

I don’t know his history, I don’t know where he learned this, but I’d really like to have a beer with this guy and talk shop.

http://www.mikematas.com/

He’s been somehow able to get rid of all the fluff, and in most cases remove all design to make the leanest experiences I’ve used, a ton of iphone apps.

1. Don’t take advice/rules lists too seriously, they’re all made up of people’s personal experiences and aren’t law.
2. Empathy will make you a better designer, especially when you’re not designing for yourself.
3. Develop your own list, based on real life experience, not what other people have told you.

The first problem I keep having with these lists is that many of them are so definite, as if the author’s experience fits the reader’s perfectly. It may be a pet peeve, but there are no absolutes, and passing down an individual experience as an absolute isn’t helpful, it’s constricting the world view of the person who takes it as gospel.

The second problem, is that by sharing their life experiences as rules or advice, the list becomes about ego. Granted, most blogs are about the author’s ego to start with, but when these lists are shared, they become the Fox news of blog posts – quick snippets taken out of context that are easy to pass around and share without putting any critical thought into them.

What I’ve found is that everyone needs to develop their own list, and that means taking other people’s experiences and your own, and factoring in context. We all owe it to ourselves to think through the rules we follow, and to keep that list of rules changing for our whole lives.

So I was thinking about why my wallet is wearing a patch in my jeans, and I realize it’s because I am carrying about 20 cards, the majority of which I don’t necessarily need to carry, I just need the number. From there I figured the ideal way to fix this would be a phone app that I could use the phone camera to scan the card’s barcode, and it figures out what card it is and stores the number and barcode for me. Then I can just pull out my phone at scanners, say the airport, or for the number when I need to input it somewhere.

I sketched it up and then played a little with the design, and this is what I came up with. Then I bothered to look and saw there is already an app for that.

Oh well, fun times.

A question I’ve been asking clients has been “Why an iPhone app?”

A lot of people have been caught up in the swell of iPhone apps being launched, and for good reason. It’s a fantastic way to get a solid user experience right in their client’s hands. I want those people to take a step back and ask themselves how many of their customers have an iPhone compared to other mobile devices.

Can we come up with a better solution by making a mobile optimized site? An Android app as well as an iPhone app?

In March 2010, according to AdMob, US Android web traffic surpassed that from the iPhone. Let’s think about this for a moment instead of creating a kneejerk iPhone app.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/admob-android-passes-iphone-web-traffic-in-u-s/

Not only are these hidden away, they are written in the most awful English known to man, legal. My father is a lawyer, and I’ve spent my life with this form of English around me but still can’t decipher what it is trying to get across. A basic usability understanding is lost when it comes to legal documents – the reader must understand what you’re saying.

Legal copy is obviously written the way it is for a reason, to close any possible loopholes another lawyer may find. It’s written not for the person it’s directed at, but for another lawyer to decipher and translate to the reader. Most of us don’t have lawyers reading all our documents for us though, I’m one of the lucky ones (thanks Dad!). This is why I believe there is a better way.

At this point, keep in mind that I am not a lawyer myself, and I certainly can’t claim this solution would stand up in a court. I’m thinking from the user’s point of view, and trying to understand what I’m reading.

One thing I do know, is Canadian and US governments are both working on a more reader friendly guideline for credit card agreements, so everyday people can understand what they are signing. Stands to reason that if they can figure that out, a website’s terms can be broken down a little easier.

A solution I have, is a commented approach. I’ve used a snippet from Amazon’s terms & conditions here, and added a column to the right with plain English comments explaining what this says and why it’s there.

What has been accomplished here is the legal copy is intact, but it’s been summarized as the user reads through. Now a regular user can understand the general idea of the terms and conditions without having a lawyer by their side.

Not only is this useful in the terms, but in the various legal notices of an average site, this plain english approach would be invaluable. Everywhere we need to include a paragraph of legal copy, beside it we can place a comment breaking it down to the essentials, potentially removing or at least helping remove a hurdle towards users opting-in. This could also remove a large number of dissatisfied users who didn’t understand what they were getting into when they signed up for a list, or a service.

When people understand what they’re doing, they are more likely to make an informed decision, and an informed user is a happy user.

Note: Like I said, I’m not a lawyer. This isn’t supposed to be legal advice, it’s just me thinking about a problem. Check with your lawyer, and read the fine print.