How something that isn’t sexy, still can be successfull

This blog is about the results of 6 weeks of thinking and working on a way to improve the image of a public utillity through a user generated community. In broad outlines I’ll sketch how and why the final solution to this problem is, against all odds, very close to the company itself.

Final presentation of concept and prototype
Yesterday I had the final presentation for 1,5 month during schoolassigment for a dutch public utillity; ENECO. It was all well-organized; ENECO had hired some space in a big building which houses several companies, the in Rotterdam well known Groothandelsgebouw. Every projectgroup that entered the assignment got a small table with a diameter of 70 centimeter. That was the place that we had to use to present our concept and prototype. We used the table for two computers to show our prototype: on each computer a movieclip with a scenario that a persona, representative of our target group (people from Rotterdam, (potential) customers of ENECO), passes through. Two posters that we designed for a campagne to support the whole thing, we sticked on the desk.

Unexpected outcome
In the beginning I did’t feel like coming to this masspresentation (there were like 35 other project-groups, all presenting their concept for ENECO). Allthough my groupmembers and me thought we had a sober, but smart and well-founded solution to the problem of ENECO (ENECO wants a closer connection to their customers), in an earlier presentation on monday for schoolteachers we got a disappointing grade because it wasn’t innovative enough. Allthough my IVID teacher Jim Boekbinder (who wasn’t at that presentation on monday, and did’t have anything to do with this grade), who knew our concept very well (and helped us a lot with it) and was quite enthousiastic about it, told us that this “rejection” is a common thing when suggesting a good, but not sexy solution to a company in need, I still felt a little bit like a looser. We were very certain about this idea, and still it was rejected!

A public utillity with their own, Youtube-like, community
So, you are probably wondering what our “brilliant” idea was about (or maybe not, but I’ll still write about it). Well, first a short description of the problem: ENECO, a public utillity with a stuffy image, wants a closer connection with their customers. Because they saw the success of user generated communities like Youtube they thought it would be a good idea to organize such a thing especially for their customers. Maybe you already see a slight problem: A public utillity with a user generated community; what kind of content should the users upload, and what should they talk about with each other? ENECO found that the theme of the community should be: “This gives me energy”, Through this “energyplatform” the users had to see energy as a concrete thing and associate energy with ENECO.

Eneco Recharge: our solution to ENECO’s problem
Our solution to the problem of ENECO was a little different then all then the other project groups, who’s thought up communities were all outside the main website of ENECO, with a very different style from ENECO. Our community itself was not really special: It was about people telling about what in their own neighbourhood environment “recharges” them, users can show on a map of their hometown where their “Recharge Spot” is.
The special thing about it, in comparison to the other solutions is that thís community is integrated in the main ENECO website and keeps the house style of ENECO. That is where customers take care of their energy-administration, like passing on their meter-readings, or new adress data in case of moving. That is also the place where non-customers, when using ENECO Recharge, will notice the other services of ENECO, and can get interested in being a customer. Because the current communication on the ENECO website is very business-like, we also had some suggestions for ENECO on how to create more balance between the business-like communication of Eneco.nl and the much more personal communication of our Eneco Recharge. Otherwise the communication by integrading Eneco Recharge in Eneco.nl would be very conflicting.

Summary: Eneco Recharge means integrating an opportunity for users to communicate with each other about their neighbourhood in ENECO’s main website, improve it’s Information Architechture to personalize information that the target group wants to see and approach them in a more personal way.

A community can be usefull in a personal way
An example of how our community can be of personal use for the ENECO customer is when someone moves passes on his new adress data. That person mostly doesn’t know much about his new neighbourhood, so Eneco Recharge can anticipate on this by offering him a service which let him meet with an inhabitant from his new neighbourhood. That person has recently ago uploaded a photo with a message on the map of the Eneco Recharge Community to tell other people about his favorite spot in his neighbourhood: his Recharge Spot. Through coupling the exsisting services customers already use with such a community there can be anticipated on being usefull on a personal for customers, who will feel as if they have more in common with their energy supplier ENECO.

Positive confirmation
Eventually it was a good thing that I went to this meeting. There were a lot of people form ENECO, the people that were really in charge of the final decision about which kind of concept (community) ENECO would like to host to improve their image. They gave Eneco Recharge really positive feedback, for me enough confirmation about the usefullness of our sober, but really potentialfull concept. We’ll see in the near future if and what ENECO will do with our suggestions.

About studioroosegaarde.net and other exciting things

I finished my thesis!
Wow! it’s already two weeks ago since I wrote my last post. I’ve been really busy with writing a test thesis. I should have been turned in last July, but I was to busy with I don’t remember what so chose to do it this study-year. Because of that I had to write more words but that’s no problem for me because I always tend to be a little long-winded with writing papers. Anyway, good news because I hand it in last Thursday, so I’m more relaxed now and things can excite me again…

Studioroosegaarde.net is online!
More exciting stuff, because last night the new www.studioroosegaarde.net went online!! After spending four months thinking of the right concept a site for an artist who’s work lies between art and architecture, (interaction) designing, actionscript programming etc, finally the first version is ready to be seen by a bigger public than Daan Roosegaarde, Theo Lagendijk and me. So take a look and don’t hesitate to say what you think about it. Like a self-respecting website in a web 2.0 era should, it’s first online performance is in a beta version, to hear from others and to see for ourselves how to improve things like navigation and graphics. There’s more to come so stay tuned.

Doing offline business web 2.0-style
There are a few more thing I really want to write something about.
Last two weeks I experienced so many thing that are worth blogging about. I already noticed the web 2.0 era. I became conscious of its existence in analogue live, a sort of “doing business 2.0″, or in my case, the 1.0 version. I was at a little exhibition, where a talented acquaintance of mine, Michiel Dronkers, had a first exposure of his artwork, which are abstract tribal paintings. I was there with Theo, we were interested in his work and of course his plans to maybe have a nice website to show his work online. I a situation like that it’s normal to give a business card, but the exhibition arranger didn’t allow him to! This probably because the arranger, a small gallery only want people to do business with artists who use their exhibition space, through them. In that way the company won’t miss out part of the money the artists gets when they sell some of their artwork.
I immediatly had a negative feeling about this, I thought it was an awkward way of doing business with people. Theo pointed out that and that it’s better for the artists and for the gallery to serve more as a platform for artists and interested parties. In that way artists have more chance for exposure, can arrange more deals, get more income, etc. The company becomes a service (you see the web 2.0 similarity?) and will also have more exposure, because they connect interested people with artists and the other way around. As a platform for several parties, the company will generate more income. And: visitors won’t have a negative taste in their mouth.

Print-media as part of a cross-media platform
Another thing I really want to spout is about an interesting guest-speaker last Friday at my school. Theme for the module “Trends & Developments” this term is “Media Shifts”. A writer, journalist and editor in chief of magazine “Nieuw Rotterdam” Nico Haasbroek, told the fourth year students about the shifts in printed media. In his opinion (and also in my opinion) the print-media is about to stay. The way to communicate an distribute it will be different though. Papers and magazines will be more like reference works with (news)backgrounds and deepening, part of a cross-media platform. Another speaker during this meeting there was Nancy Ubert (link to Dutch website), who could tell some interesting things about how this works in practice. More than a year ago, she started a local newspaper, which is published three times a week. There is also an online version (link to Dutch website) of the paper, where news is published every day. The paper is very popular, and according to Ubert, this is because of the local character of the paper, popular content like a “girl of the week“(link to Dutch website)  item, and the arise of a community: The journalists and other employees of the paper are working in a store where everyone can walk in and take a cup of coffee. Sometimes people come in and ask if they can fax a letter. This is allowed, but only if that person tells the journalists what the fax is about. The community also organizes (playfull) charity activities. This way, the paper collect real local news, instead of publishing press reports. This is a really short summary of the meeting, but I really wanted to write down something about this interesting and creative developments.

Will a 22 year paralysed arm work again?
One more thing: Last friday morning I was in the metro, going to my work. I spoke with an acquaintance, that hadn’t seen for a while, maybe like three or four years. She was on her way to the hospital, and was very excited. Since she was born, her left-arm has been paralysed. Now, 22 years later, the medical science and techniques are so far that there is a chance that she can use her arm again!
She was on her way to a whole day full of all kinds of tests to see for example which nerves in her arm are still working and if the new technique is working for her. I’m not sure which technique exactly will be used to make her arm “work” again, therefore the time we spent together in the metro was to short. But nevertheless: Because of things like this I think it’s great to live in the 21st century!

Wikipedia: quality articles or quality vandalism precautions

Reliability and Vandalism
Wikipedia is a popular place to get some brief information about almost every subject you can imagine.
The wiki-based, user-generated content-sharing site, is governed by the Wikimedia Foundation. More projects of the foundation, supporter of the free culture and software movement, are: wikiversity, wiktionary, wikibooks and worldwikia. One of the main issues, concerning the user and owner goals and expectations, in a site where users themselves can take an active role, is the discouraging of vandalism (by users) in the content and, very important for the success of Wikipedia, prevent the display of unreliable articles.

“If enough users agree with them it becomes true” [Jimmy Wales, 2006.]

Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, held the opening speech at the Wikimania (August) 2006. He had a lot of interesting things to say, also about wikipedia’s main issues. Concerning the reliability issue: He knows the articles at Wikipedia are “pretty good”, they are written by passionate people, and Wikipedia users feel more and more the responsibility trustful and readable articles. Even scientific articles are, according to specialists Jimmy spoke with, correct, all tough not always very in-depth and up to date to the latest discoveries.

The right kind of barriers
I think it’s a good thing that despite the risk of vandalism, the barriers of editing (or vandalize) a Wikipedia article are still very low. You usually don’t have to sign in and you don’t have to do an intelligent test before you add your knowledge about a subject. Wikipedia always is in search for good quality editors, so even the slightest barrier, like code in the editor, can deter people and have to be eliminated. Take away the barriers so intelligent people can easily leave good and trustful content, is more important than precautionary measures against vandalism and incorrect articles. In an open system it’s also easier to correct mistakes than to make them.
Therefore Wikipedia uses soft security. Only after damage has been done, measures will be taken. Editors of articles can use several features to easily see recent changes and differences, receive modification warnings and revision history. When a user keeps on deleting content or adding nonsense to articles, eventually he or she will be blocked. That’s not the perfect solution, because people can use someone else’s ip-adress, so also legitimate users can be affected by this measure.

 

Design Patterns
I want to address a few Design Patterns that can be used or are used for Wikipedia. For screening of the content, but also for the mainly concrete goal the broad target group has, visiting Wikipedia.

First thing you need when you want to screen a particular article, is an Article Page Pattern. To, for example, easily see recent changes and check these, you will need the Highlight Pattern that highlights changes in a text field. To navigate back in time, I think the best opportunity to give the editor, is to enable him to go back to every point in time where the article has been changed. To view an articles history, Wikipedia works with the use of a List Browser, where list items are the states of the article, sorted by the date of change. The radiobutton of the displayed article is checked. Maybe even a Container Navigation Pattern can be used. The three panes contain a list of changed articles, per article a list of the states the article has been in (sorted by date or maybe by how big the changes were) and in the third pane the selected article. Of course there is also the place to edit the article or choose the article (-state) to display online.

All the precautions and actions (the use of “featured”, “locked” and “stable” articles, warning systems, etc.) of Wikipedia to eliminate vandalism results that incorrect articles are reverted in five minutes.

One thing about the broad target group of Wikipedia, and why I think the use of the Simple Search Pattern is suitable. People mostly know what specific thing they are looking for, and even if they don’t know the correct spelling, Wikipedia still returns some relevant search results. If people don’t exactly know what they are looking for, but do know a less relevant keyword, they can always go to the category-page, which one click further away then the search possibility.

FRESJ; catching up. Stay ahead and keep delivering quality

When I designed my first portfolio three years ago, I wanted to position myself as a self-confident and unique designstudent. I thought up the brandname Fresj: Fresh designs, and a little different. My tagline was “standing in nobodyelse’s shoes “. A year later I wanted to make a different statement, also as a stimulation for myself to deepen more into definitions of problems, contexts and backgrounds. “Style requires brains” became my mission statement.
Right now I’m a fourth year student and still have the idea that there still so much I should know and that everything goes so fast. The work I deliver are more and more for serious clients who expect a well-considered endproduct. I think the right sentence that summarises this state where I am now is “catching up” , because that is also where I use this blog for: catching up with everything I need to know to stay ahead and keep delivering quality.