There’s not much I can add to this, as the video says it all, but the folks at Ikea came up with a brilliant use of Facebook technology to do something new, innovative and incredibly awesome. Check out the video for yourself and see how they leveraged a community’s willingness to participate with everyone’s love of free stuff to generate an enormous amount of buzz about their efforts.
The folks at Ikea score big by leveraging Facebook's existing functionality.
Jarvis Cocker is a British musician probably best known as the former frontman for the band, Pulp. He is currently (as in now through tomorrow) set up in the London Underground for a series of ongoing performances that are being streamed live on the Web. Interesting idea from a publicity standpoint, but from a design and web perspective, I’m more interested in the integration of the accompanying Twitter feed. I’m starting to see more examples of these across the Web and believe they’ll become even more ubiquitous as marketers strive to get more real-time conversations happening around their brands.
With the companion Twitter feed, it's not only the artist that gets to share the spotlight.
In my opinion, many companies and individuals (myself included) struggle to put their Twitter feeds to good use. While it wasn’t a use of their own feed that makes this video interesting, it does relate how one company, P.F. Chang’s, capitalized on the real-time nature of the medium to make one customer a fan for life. And if Twitter is capable of doing that for P.F. Chang’s, who’s to say it couldn’t do something remarkable for your business, too.
I recently came across the ground-breaking (my word, maybe not yours) website for digital agency Modernista, at modernista.com. It’s a pageless concept that utilizes the existing framework of the web to serve it’s information. Want to see their work? They take you to Flickr and YouTube. Want to know about their history? See their page on Wikipedia. Press releases, news? Served up on a Google news feed.
Modernista.com: page-less website awesome-ness
From an experiential and design perspective, there is room for improvement. The navigation device could be more elegant and I’d like to see it move more quickly and have a more persistent location as it moves from site to site, but I’m not here to hate. Frankly, I find this to be a brilliant example of work and an approach that anyone developing a site should explore.
Many of the clients I work with are rebuilding their 3-4 year old sites to better align with current technology. But why? As the modernista site so clearly articulates, there is no reason to invest in infrastructure when you can serve your entire site and experience on the existing backbone of the web. From a UX standpoint, your users are simply finding your content on sites they, probably, already have at least a passing familiarity with.
I like this approach for portal and aggregator sites as well. But in fairness, I think the challenges of maintaining the content might prove to be more challenging than your own content management system, but who knows? Maybe in the long run, at least from an economics perspective, it would pay off to have more effort in content posting and updating than in technology maintenance and infrastructure redevelopment?
