Jim Jacoby, Manifest Founder, and PJ Loughran, Manifest Chief Creative Officer, are interviewed by Tim Jahns at Beyond the Pedway. Good stuff.

Can’t say it better myself…

If you haven’t seen or experienced Chat Roulette yet, it’s catching a lot of buzz lately. Both intriguing and extremely disturbing is how I’d describe it. WARNING: You’ll likely encounter lots of random situations and likely things you wish you wouldn’t have seen (your eyes may burn and you might go cry to your mom). I also caution you to not pull it up at work. Anyway, I was on Vimeo and came across this great video that explains what Chat Roulette is all about. I highly recommend watching this video before clicking the link to Chat Roulette in that first sentence above. Highly. Oh, and if or when you click the link, I’d make sure you know who’s around your computer. You might get some pretty messed up stuff. Proceed with caution.

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

I’m working with a client where we’re launching a personal brand online. We’ve been discussing the advantages and disadvantages on how to use social media tools like Twitter and Facebook at various points on the project. Recently, we talked at length about a strategy for using a Facebook Fan Page. Talking with Manifest’s social media expert, Christine Mortensen, and our marketing expert, Jonas Paretzkin,  led us to the following simple points of why you should use a Facebook Fan page over a personal profile for any brand on Facebook…

Creating a Fan Page is a best practice as users will look for that first over a regular profile page

A Fan page adds credibility behind the brand, it appears more official/professional (credible)

Fan pages provide valuable reporting features or “insights” such as fan count, the number of interactions on your page each week, the demographics of your fans and more

Fans can easily interact with each other via wall posts, discussion boards, etc.

Fan pages provide an opportunity to create custom applications hosted on your fan page that visitors can interact with. This also creates an additional visiting attraction to the Fan page.

Having a fan page allows you to send messages to your entire FB fan base at one time

You can leverage your own personal profile page by sharing posts from the fan page (via the “share” button)

A Fan Page allows you to create the Fan Page box/widget for your site, that promotes all of the fan activity on the fan page itself (an example of what this looks like)

There’s much more to think about as well when considering the options – e.g., page administration, separation of truly personal information vs. general, publicly available information, etc.  – so don’t think of an end all, be all list. If you think of more, feel free to add it as a comment below.

What do you get when you mix Elvis’ 75^th birthday, 1,000s of tech geeks and gambling? (Cue John Favreau and Vince Vaughn) “Vegas baby, Vegas!” It’s an annual tradition for me – visit mom for her birthday, celebrate Elvis’, hit up Monster Cable’s concert and of course check out all the great new ‘toys’ at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). A little slice of heaven, really. This year was no exception, lots of new products and excitement. As part tech geek and part experience designer, here’s my take on this year’s CES…

My Faves from CES 2010

If you’ve never been to CES, love cutting edge technology, and enjoy some of the best people watching on the planet, then what the hell are you doing? Don’t miss CES. It’s your chance to see the widest range of computer and electronic gadgetry in the country, let alone the world. Some of my favorites this year included:

• 3D TVs – A huge hit. It was everywhere, as if one TV manufacturer leaked it to another and they all had it. After seeing a movie like Avatar in 3D, I’m psyched about the possibilities for my home theater. CNET has a great overview of the 3D TVs featured. Many of the prices still TBD, but expect them to be pricey and need to buy a variety of accessories (like glasses).
• iPhone Controlled Helicopter – What!? Yes, an iPhone app that uses many of the device’s features to control a toy helicopter. Probably one of the coolest toys I’ve seen in a long time and I’m not even into remote controlled cars/helicopters. Check out more of the Parrot AR.Drone.
• Power Over WiFi – Imagine a world where you never have to charge your cell phone or laptop again. It just recharges from existing wireless connections in the area, and you don’t even have to be connected to those wireless hot spots. Awesome, I know. Even non-geeks can appreciate this. Oh, and it’s coming this summer. Check out RCA’s Airnergy on Engadget.
• Intel’s Processing Power – We’ve all seen the Intel commercials. Personally, I’ve never found their marketing pitches and concept prototypes to be that engaging. Until now. This multi-touch wall with live data feed was INCREDIBLE. You have to see it to believe it.
• Celebrity Star Power Sells (or at least companies are betting on it) – From Lady Gaga being named a Creative Director of special projects and inventions at Polaroid to seemingly every artist now getting their own tweaked out headphones from Monster Cable, there were celebs everywhere. I’m not convinced that celeb power will ultimately sell more product over great quality and fair price, but cool nonetheless. If they’re smart, they’ll figure out a way to combine them.

The Impact of CES on an Experience Designer

For experience designers, the technology at this year’s CES provided signs as to the tremendous impact on what and how we design for devices and user interfaces in the next few years. The principles of information architecture, interaction design, usability and visual design will be stretched, pulled apart and put back together again. We’ll have to make strategic experience design decisions as to what user interfaces look like, or perhaps even how their defined and how they reveal information using things like user action/gesture and environment context. Add in content that’s streaming to more and more devices each day from the far reaching corners of the Internet, and we’re in for some awesome design challenges.

Well, there you have it, “… just a hunk, a hunk of…” good time this year at CES. Until next year!

Four new videos have been added to the Manifest Digital library…

Manifest Reel from manifest on Vimeo.

We solve business problems first. Our unique skill sets provide perspective. The blend creates well-rounded decisions. From banner ads to enterprise-integrated applications, we are focused on the outcome and the customer at all times. It’s hard work and we love doing it. Take look into our world and those we’ve worked with.

Be Here Now from manifest on Vimeo.

Don’t just be your customer, be in their moment. Don’t be all things to all people, be everything you can be right now. Build a fulfilling environment that releases constant innovation.

Fire from manifest on Vimeo.

Live in the moment. Seek to understand what you’re dealing with. React. Not knowing and understanding is like playing with fire.

Our People (Edition 1) from manifest on Vimeo.

People call us by our first name. They stay with us for our brains. As for beauty, we think it’s found in the company we keep. Get an insider’s perspective on our folks. Featured in this edition are: Laureen Feeny, Ryan Noel, Bethany Steffen, Josh Lamb, Nick Elliot, Danny Davis and Jeff Kao.

If you’re not a Fast Company subscriber or reader, you should be. There’s always some good content. It’s not always the first to report, but it does provide a great breadth and depth of topics, particularly around design and technology.

As a designer and techno-geek, Fast Company recently published a couple articles on “killer” Microsoft Surface Table applications. Still very much a technology looking for a solution, the Microsoft Surface Table continues to gain traction in the business world as we figure out just what to do with this BAT (big ass table). Anyway, there are some interesting applications that are showcased.

• 11 Killer Apps for Microsoft Surface
• Five More Killer Apps for Microsoft Surface

Of course I would be remiss if I didn’t give some shout outs to my friends over at Phenomblue for their Genesis application built for South by Southwest (SXSW) this year; a 3-D application allowing users to create virtual galaxies. Sweet.

And… of course, even though not mentioned, Manifest’s very own conference table application, originally designed for the interaction ’09 conference, is pretty sweet in its own right.

Recently, a student of my Interaction Design course at DePaul University asked about “ribbon” design in user interfaces. For you Microsoft Office users, you know what I mean – the new navigational element of the 2007 version. Anyway, she’s working on a fairly complex Windows-based application that is “used to drive specialized medical equipment that automates the preparatoin of intravenous nutrition solutions for critically ill patients”.  Anyway, as part of our discussion, I came across some links that I haven’t seen for a while and given their great information, I thought I’d share here…

• Dan Harrelson, design technologist at Adaptive Path, interviews Jensen Harris, Group Program Manager of Microsoft’s Office User Experience team
• The Story of the Ribbon by Jensen Harris on an Official Microsoft User Interface Blog

If you are familar with other great summaries of the design of the Office ribbon, please do share.

Last week I had the honor of presenting a “selling the value of user-centered deisgn” workshop to a very important financial and economic regulating body. As part of the workshop I developed this presentation. The presentation covers:

• Why is user-centered design important?
• How do I communicate the value of user-centered design?
• Understanding how to prove, if necessary, a return on investment (ROI)
• A role playing exercise for selling the value of user-centered design to various project/client stakeholders

Note: If you’d like a copy of the role playing exercise, please contact me directly.

I recently interviewed someone that used Wordle for the cover of their portfolio. Intrigued, I thought I would check it out for myself. (Excuse me if I’m behind the times on this one.)

From Wordle’s website…

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

When I look at this from a user experience/ information architect point of view, I automatically think of tag clouds. Ya know, the hodge-podge list of tags typically found on sites such as blogs, representing the prominence of various tags that someone has associated with the site’s content.

But, I also think about a whole variety of other requirements gathering sessions, usability tests, card sorting and visual/emotional design tests that I’ve done it the past. Why? Well, because I’m always looking for new and better ways to illustrate the findings from these type of activities; specifically, findings from these activities that require a sense of prioritization and weighting. A feature of Wordle allows you to simply input a list of words, say from a resume, a bio (like mine below) or perhaps even notes from a design research activity like the ones I mentioned.

To provide an example, I took results from a emotional design test that I conducted for a client. Basically, the participants were provided a screen’s visual design for 5 seconds, then the design was taken away and they selected descriptor words from a worksheet that they felt best described what they had seen. Based on the frequency of occurrence of the words selected by the participants, here’s the result that Wordle generated for me…

My takeaway – a tool like Wordle could be used as a means to communicate results from various types of design research activities, especially ones that use more structured data capture methods (e.g. when participants all select from a predetermined list of descriptor words). In the past, I would have to tally up the occurrance of each word selected overall and then increase/decrease font sizes based on the word’s number of occurances during the activity. Now, I can just use Wordle to create the visual pattern for me. I will definitely try this tool in some future efforts and report back on its viability.

By the way, here’s my bio through the eyes of Wordle…