As you can imagine, the BOALT office is full of technology nerds. Everyone has their own little device or site that they follow, but consistently the thing that many of us overlap on is the Technology, Entertainment, Design or the TED Talks.Their slogan is simply: Ideas worth spreading. So I’m taking a cue from them and spreading this. They release a new TED talk almost weekly, sometimes we miss them but when we do see them, they definitely blow us away because each presentation is always groundbreaking and thought provoking.

The one that stood out in the office this week was from Pranav Mistry and his SixthSense technology. Essentially Mistry has created a combination camera and projector unit call the SixthSense device. The unit enhances the physical world with digital information.

The camera on the SixthSense device will determine what physical object you’re looking at or holding and then project digital information onto the object. You can then interact with the digital information through a series of hand gestures. Confusing?

The best example from the video is a woman walking around; then she sees something she’d like to photograph. She simple holds her hands in front of the object. She then frames what she wants to photograph with her fingers and the unit’s camera automatically takes a photo and stores it to be edited later.

The hand gestures mimic some of the gestures used on our iPhones and other multi-touch devices. The biggest difference is the touch screen is the air. Mistry’s goal is to bridge the gap between our digital and physical lives. A lofty goal for anyone. The uses that Mistry demonstrates seem straight out of science fiction. He made a phone call on the palm of his hand. He played Pong on the subway and watched a video of a press conference given by President Obama right on top of the news article of the same news conference.

The limitation that I can see with his existing design is the quality of the projection. Most of his examples are in facets of our life in which quality of image is most important: movie watching and photo editing. Obviously this is only step one but as the technology improves and the quality of the product advances, the uses are endless. It’s an amazing first step towards integrating our physical world with our digital future.

So you’re on a crowded street and you’re looking for a place to eat. If you have a smart phone, you’ll whip it out, open Google Maps, and do a search. Effective, but not sexy.

Today, at least for our friends across the pond, this has changed. BBC News has a story of a British company, Acrossair, that has created an iPhone application that overlays digital information on top of realtime video captured by the camera. Using this program, all you would have to do is look ‘through’ your iPhone camera to see points of interest on your path.

Smart and Sexy

Companies have already developed similar heads-up displays, but they’re nothing you’d wear in public; imagine donning this contraption on a first date. Using an iPhone to do the same is ingenious, socially acceptable and is sure to spawn even more innovation.

I wanted to do a quick product review for a product I started using today.  It’s called Litmus.  You got to see it to believe it!  It rocks!

Stumbled upon a gem of an article/essay; A Brief History of Web Design, written by a South African graphic designer, Ben Ceglowski. It’s a wonderfully thorough account of the evolution of visual design of the internet medium. The essay starts with a bit of a history lesson on how the internet as we know it came to be, and guides you through some of the technological advances of markup language, and how it’s impacted the ability of visual designers to work within the perceived limitations of web constraints — creating an artform within itself. It’s well worth the read, and bravo to Mr. Ceglowski for taking the time to put together such an impressive information piece. I found it very insightful, makes me wonder how it will evolve next. Let me know what you think.

Smashing Magazine recently cited some design trends for 2009. As a designer that’s seen the evolution of the web from it’s early incarnations in the mid 90’s to where it is today, I’m noticing some design styles and practices that are starting to come full circle. Because of the accessibility of CSS-based layouts, web and screen design is starting to break away from the standard web paradigm that dominated in the early part of this decade; left logo, horizontal nav bar, flash brand area, neatly clustered sub-content boxes — to large expansive displays of content, vertically and horizontally. Bandwidth and screen resolution no longer seems limiting. Designers have evolved from designing within a 780 pixel wide area to designing wide layout-breaking backgrounds for widescreen displays of up to 1980 pixels wide. For designers like myself, there’s a opportunity to expand the boundaries of what is generally thought of as baseline web design architecture. But doing so effectively, and maintaining the end goal of optimizing the experience for clients, users, and ultimately consumers is the core challenge. Pretty layouts, and ego-centric design can be nice on the eyes, be the main question usually is… will it drive the sale?

There seems to be an ongoing debate within our agency on how much time should be spent on information architecture.  In retrospect, I think the main reason we previously focused so much time on information architecture was because we needed a client sign off and found it more efficient to make changes in this stage.  But what happens when we’re working on one of our own start ups?  How should we approach information architecture?

The below snippet is from a 30 page set of wireframes that we provided to Aspen Snowmass when we designed and developed their booking engine user interface.  Information architecture was a must for this project because making changes in the development phase would have been extremely inefficient.

37Signals in their Getting Real book, swears by building out the interface first.  “Too many apps start with a program-first mentality. That’s a bad idea. Programming is the heaviest component of building an app, meaning it’s the most expensive and hardest to change. Instead, start by designing first.”

In some cases, I’m starting to find that the best approach for us is to develop loosely and build out the interface as you adaptively learn the application’s functionality.  Every time we’ve focused our energy on user interface it seems to delay the development cycle and I found ourselves unnecessarily changing the UI several times.  This approach worked particularly well in the development of DCHistoricTours.com because we had a vision of what we wanted to accomplish but we didn’t know the degree of functionality some of the API’s would provide. In this case, we jumped into development first.

It’s tricky and I don’t think there has to be a standard process. To me it depends on what type of project your working on.  Do you have a clear concise idea of what you want or are you unsure?

So with that said, I’m curious to hear what you think on the future of information architecture?  Have you had similar experiences?  What is your agencies approach?  Does it have a set approach?  Please comment below.

After several weeks of hard planning, I’m sure that Peter Corbett of IStrategyLabs is glad to know that the Apps for Democracy was a huge success.  I’m glad that BOALT took home the agency 1st prize and was able to build an application that was going to help the community so much. So what’s next for DCHistoricTours.com?

After speaking with D.C.’s Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, last night, he told me that one of the reasons we were chosen was because they wanted to use our application on main D.C. inauguration website.  This would provide the many anticipated visitors this January a helpful resource to learn more about our nation’s capitol.  I thought that was pretty exciting so naturally I stayed up last night wondering what I could do to improve the app.

Well for starters, we rolled out a social feature last night that allows visitors to comment on other tours. This way users can interact with the person who created the tour and the community.

Next on the agenda, is to create an official inauguration route as per the request of Vivek Kundra.  If anybody would like to help out, please contact me.

And finally, on the not too far horizon, we are planning on developing a location-aware mobile version of the app. That way visitors can retrieve their tours while they are on the actually tour and be provided with useful facts based on their location.

BOALT has no intention on monetizes this app at the moment, and welcomes any volunteers.

Disclaimer: Should the costs to maintain the website exceed our threshold in the near future we might be forced to find a way to monetize the app through sponsors, etc but the application will always remain free to visitors.

For the past couple of weeks since we decided to submit an application to the Apps for Democracy Innovation Contest we’ve been hard at work. After many sleepless nights, triple caramel macchiatos (or was that a quad) and more QA testing, our app is almost here.  I’ve been getting several emails from industry colleagues asking me how things are coming along and I decided to post a screenshot this glorious morning. The tempature is supposed to reach 70 today in D.C. and it’s the middle of November.  Wow, who would have known, I would moved up here a long time ago.  You’ll all be able to play with the app early next week, until then – sayonara.

Sexy creative is not enough to generate leads and orders through the web.  There are many different attributes that can ultimately affect your bottom line. The concept is not too hard to understand but most of our clients don’t want to spend money on multivariate or A/B testing.

Take a look at our startup, RushMyPassport.com.  We average approximately 100 orders a day and a redesign of our homepage increased our sales by almost $4k per day. Yep, that’s right, over $100k a month.

So, what’s the secret formula.  It’s not rocket science, the trick is get over yourself, it’s not about what you want. It’s about what the masses want. Once you understand this, you’ll attain more than desirable results.