Spotted this on TIME.com today. The web version of WorldWide Telescope made it as one of the 50 Best Websites in 2009. The website, which is driven by Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, is the browser version of the client application we helped design in collaboration with Curtis Wong and his team. We’re really excited to see this news and hope that more people get to experience astronomy in an immersive way.
WorldWide Telescope allows people to dig deeper into space with high resolution imagery of galaxies and stars without requiring powerful telescopes. It also includes guided tours that walks through different systems and images across the sky for people who are just getting started with astronomy.
So congrats Curtis and team! We can’t wait to see more from this project.
If I could choose someone from all of history to have a beer with, Richard Feynman would be on my short list. Books and audio recordings of his physics lectures have sold like crazy, even more among enthusiasts than as textbooks. He makes physics concepts approachable and even fun in singular, inimitable way. His memorable personality and antics are almost as well known. Bill Gates feels the same way; it’s what led him to acquire some of Feynman’s lectures.
So, when Microsoft Research asked us to create an innovative experience centered on a previously unreleased video-recorded lecture series, we jumped at the chance to work on it. Now, Project Tuva is available to the world.
As we watched these lectures for the first time we knew it was important to think of the kind of tasks unique to content so rich with ideas. We worked with an enthusiastic Microsoft Research team to develop an understanding of who could benefit from the site. After brainstorming and narrowing to an innovative feature set, we developed an information architecture and then a working Silverlight prototype illustrating what it would be like. We’re happy to see that the folks at Stimulant refined these ideas and built a great-looking experience that also performs well.
The content of Feynman’s seven Messenger Lectures lent itself to many outside learning resources we called Extras, like the one shown above. They’re cued by the content of the lecture. Some of them even update his slides of astronomical objects with interactive imagery and tours in WorldWide Telescope (another of our Microsoft Research projects that recently won an award). Focusing on teachers, students, and enthusiasts led to several other cool features:
Quickly find what you need:
Search over multiple video transcripts
Chaptered playhead navigation
Unique visual timeline
Time-synched video for search results, extras, and your own notes
Don’t just watch, understand:
Transcript synchronized to video playback
Interactive Extras expand on concepts from the video
Time-stamped note taking
Go fullscreen to watch without distraction
We also designed a cool set of community authoring tools and sharing capabilities.
Take a look! His teaching style is captivating and it’s fascinating how well the lectures still capture modern physics after all these years.
P.S. In case you’re wondering, Tuva is an area in central Asia, then part of the USSR, that Feynman aspired to visit for years. He died of cancer before the visa arrived.
“Also superb is that whenever Feynman mentions a constellation or spatial anomaly a link will take you to Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope so you can go and take a look for yourself. It’s so brilliantly designed and wonderfully implemented it’s quite obviously a labour of love. It’s also precisely how I want to see historical information presented and updated.”
Sam Chenaur, Platform Strategy Advisor for Microsoft, wrote a great entry covering our collaboration with Identity Mine and InfoSpace. The project set out to design a new toolbar that utilizes the power of Silverlight™ technology to perform engaging interactions beyond current experiences. InfoSpace currently offers wallpapers and recipes, but they have set out plans to extend this service through the simple, yet functional shell, such as weather, music and horoscopes.
Chenaur also points out the benefits of an RIA implementation, which extends the idea of the conventional toolbar:
The use of a rich interactive technology, like Silverlight, to power a user interactivity is important as it creates an engaging experience for the user. Unlike other toolbars available today, crammed with indistinguishable icons, the toolbars developed by InfoSpace are a fresh experience with simple, elegant and consistent user experiences. Each toolbar sort of act as a Rich Interactive Application (RIA) that happens to live at the top of your browser.
If you haven’t already done so, take this short quiz. The Answers are at the bottom of this page.
If you got more than two right, you’re my hero. When I tested this quiz with folks at Artefact, the results were appalling. The commoditization of e-commerce experiences is an industry-wide phenomenon, to the point where even the patriotic use of red, white and blue doesn’t make much difference. The sites miss obvious opportunities to articulate their brand values or provide deeply engaging user experiences, a sense of wonder and exploration. Perhaps retailers are hesitant to invest in a great user experience, given low stickiness of online users – after all, it is possible that in search for a better price users will abandon a no-matter-how-compelling online experience in favor of another e-retailer who carries the same goods at a lower price. But without developing compelling experiences, isn’t that a self-fulfilling prophecy?
So why should retailers care to differentiate their online retail experiences? Here are a few facts:
According to Shop.org and Forrester research, online sales account for 7% of all retail and are growing faster than the overall retail market at 17-24% year over year (and while slowdowns in retail growth have been projected, they are expected to affect online retail less than the traditional retail).
For retailers, the 7% revenues from online purchases translate into significantly higher percentage of their profits. That’s because margins are thicker for online stores due to lower costs of not having to maintain a physical presence.
Many users tend to do online research even if they actually later purchase the item in the physical store. So the 7% of actual revenues translates into a lot more first impressions.
Despite these fairly promising trends in online retail, e-commerce sites are facing some tough challenges. As noted before, user loyalty is low. “Brand defectors” – the people who make the purchase in a physical store of a different company than whose site they visited for the research – are a common phenomenon, and as many as two-thirds of online buyers say they prefer to make the actual purchase at the physical store, according to a Forrester Research study. It also turns out that online shoppers are becoming more and more cautious. Even if they do complete a purchase online, the time between the initial visit to the site and the actual purchase has gone up from 19 to 34 hours since 2005, according to a large study by ScanAlert. What are they doing between the initial visit and the actual purchase? Likely more research and reaching out to the community of other buyers. After all, two-thirds buyers believe that the same items should be cheaper online, to quote Forrester again.
You might say, the industry has trained its users to look at online retail as a commodity experience you turn to if you’re looking for the lowest price. Perhaps as a result of these expectations, the key focus of online retail experiences – particularly for these large retailers that carry multiple brands – has been on the efficiency of the site. Web analytics, and design decisions optimized on getting the user from A to B in the lowest number of clicks, and to serve up most relevant recommendations for the user to act on, has been the priority of the industry.
Yet analysts are beginning to call for Web 2.0 innovations. Analysts generally agree that social aspects of shopping have become of particular importance in influencing product decisions. According to Jupiter Research, 77% of all online shoppers employ user-generated product reviews and ratings, 25% consult social and community sites to conduct research on potential purchases. It seems to be working for Amazon, the #1 e-retailer on the web, according to an Internet Retailer article. If retailers delay the integration of online communities directly into their e-commerce site, one can imagine that users will continue to go elsewhere to find the information they are looking for. And they may not come back.
The other aspect of the e-commerce behavior has to do with how engaging the experience is. As discussed earlier, there are good reasons for enhancing click-through and check-out rates, but what’s lost in this race to the finish is the opportunity for genuine exploration and fun. In other words, on the hierarchy of online shopping needs, the basic need for functional, reliable experience has trumped the need for desirable experiences – so far. Yet physical retail stores are investing tremendous amounts of money into creating flashy, immersive environments that optimize for retaining the customer in the store for as long as possible (meandering elevator layout, piano music, coffee bar, lounge, etc.). Nobody seems to be chasing them out of the store. So why doesn’t online retail attempt to preserve some of this customer engagement?
Retailers are beginning to recognize the importance of immersive experiences. The ones who carry their own brands are the first ones to invest in their brand online. Take Nike or Mini Cooper. The car industry in particular has recognized across the board that it’s about building (and building upon) a community of brand loyalists. But we are also beginning to see some explorations of new user experiences among multi-brand retailers. Nordstrom’s Designer Collection makes an (admittedly timid) attempt to provide a special user experience through the use of great photography, easier navigation, and – in their own words – “a delightful dose of charm.”
Don’t get me wrong, Nordstrom is guilty of unimaginative retail experience in many parts of its site. The Designer Collection is but one attempt to spice up the experience for the customer who is willing to pay a premium.
The interesting strategy here appears to be in separating the day-to-day operations of the site (the functional, practical, get-to-the-checkout-fast part of it) from the special part designed for “special” customer. But you could argue this is one sign that major retailers are at least experimenting with the possibilities of e-commerce experiences.
A year or two ago, Artefact developed an e-commerce concept for the Nau brand as a piece of envisioning of what the e-commerce experience can be if one were to truly embrace the possibilities of rich web applications producing a new level of immersion.
Admittedly, when this demo was produced, it was largely a fantasy. But with web technologies like Silverlight reaching new levels of maturity, there are fewer technical limitations these days. As shoppers, we give up so much of a great experience by shopping online, and I can’t help but wonder if this trade-off is necessary and unavoidable?
Recently at Mix, I ran into a couple of UI folks from Netflix. We got into a over dinner conversation where we talked about some of the UI issues with their service. They asked at the end of dinner if I’d care to write a critique of the site. We conducted a brainstorm with about 8 Artefact people (all Netflix users) for a couple of hours and generated a list of maybe 30 big and small issues and opportunities for Netflix and their site. I wrote up the notes, then was about to hit Send when the Netflix team did a fairly significant update to their site rendering allot of the issues redundant. It took a week or two to re-do this list and Kudos to the Netflix team their site dramatically improved in this release. Overall their site UI is pretty good, we rate it an overall B, but there’s lots of small and large opportunities for them to make the Netflix site the best Movie authority destination on the internet. The picture above shows a concept featuring a movie preview on the home page, with the ability filter in the individual movie bands.
Once we sent the document, Netflix immediately responded with some very nice feedback answering many of the issues this document raises. They asked I keep thier feedback confidential. You can read the document here.
by Kevin Wong, posted August 24th, 2009
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