@Publish

Customizing content, as Chubb did with Masterpiece, is a form of simplicity because it involves winnowing information and increasing relevancy.

Even the largest company can achieve the illusion that it is speaking to you and only you.

According to a recent survey by the research firm Outlaw Consulting, the youngest wave of Generation Y consumers (those aged twenty-one to twenty-seven) responds very positively to brands that communicate with them in a “straightforward and stripped-down way, use plain packaging, and avoid excess,”

One of the qualities these younger respondents associate with simplicity is authenticity--that is, “keeping it simple” is tantamount to “keeping it real.”

Many brands these days would kill to be thought of by younger consumers as “real” and “authentic,” yet they fail to recognize that simplicity--in their products, packaging, and messaging--is one of the most important ways to convey this quality.

When we talk about breakthrough simplicity, we mean an interaction that cuts through the clutter. This is a standard that should be applied to everything a company puts out into the world, from the product to the ads down to the smallest piece of correspondence: It should do its job quickly, clearly, simply. People just don’t have the time or the interest to wade through corporate rhetoric and jargon to figure out what you’re trying to tell them. Through clarity of thought and presentation, it’s possible for a business to rise above the cacophony of today’s marketplace.

simplicity sells

When you hover over a menu item, a submenu appears. But apart from hovering over an item, you can also simply click on it to follow the link. Now, what should happen when you tap on the item with a touch device? Should the submenus appear, or should the link activate? Or both? Or should something else happen? On iOS, something else happens. The first time you tap a link like that, the submenu appears; in other words, the hover event fires. You have to tap a second time to actually follow the link. This is confusing, and not many people will tap a second time. On Android, the submenu appears and the link is followed simultaneously. I don’t have to explain to you that this is confusing.

It’s very well possible to think of complex solutions11 whereby you define different interactions for different input devices. But the better solution, I think, is to make sure that the default interaction, the activate event, just works for everybody. If you really need to, you could choose to enhance this default experience for certain users.

The same principle that we follow for interactions — whereby we design the activate event first and enhance it later — applies to graphic design. We should start designing the things that we know everyone will see. That’s the content. No matter how big or small a screen is and no matter how minimal the feature set of a browser, it will be able to show letters.

rather than pollute the page with all kinds of links to get people out of there, we should really focus on that thing in the middle. Make sure it works. Make sure it looks good. Make sure it’s readable.

you start by designing the relationship between the different font sizes.

When the typography is done, you would start designing the layout for bigger screens; you can think of this as an enhancement for people with bigger screens. And after that, when the different layouts are done, you could add the paint. And by paint, I mean color, gradients, borders, etc.

When I say to start with typography, I don’t mean that you aren’t allowed to think about paint at the same time. Rather, I’m trying to find the things that all of these different devices, with all of their different screen sizes and all of their different features, have in common. It just seems logical to first design this shared core thoroughly. The strange thing is that this core is often overlooked: Web professionals tend to view their own creations with top-of-the-line devices with up-to-date browsers. They see only the enhancements. The shared core with the basic experience is often invisible.

All of the things we created first — the navigation, the widgets, the footer — they all helped the visitor to leave the page. But the visitor probably wanted to be there! That was weird.

To build a responsive website that works on all kinds of screens, designing for a small screen first is easiest. It forces you to focus on what’s really important: if it doesn’t fit in this small square, it is probably not terribly important. It forces you to think better about hierarchy, about the right order of components on the page.

Once you’re done with the content, you can start to ask yourself whether this content needs a header. Or a logo. Or subnavigation. Does it need navigation at all? And does it really need all of those widgets? The answer to that last question is “No.” I’ve never understood what those widgets are for. I have never seen a useful widget. I have never seen a widget that’s better than white space.

does the logo really need to be at the top16 of every page? It could very well go in the footer on many websites

the option to add extra luggage to a flight booking might be most effective right there in the overview of the flight, instead of in the middle of a list of links somewhere on the left of the page.

does the main navigation look more important than the main content? Most of the time it shouldn’t be, and I usually consider the navigation to be footer content.

“I post on a friend’s wall to say ‘Happy birthday,’ but that’s pretty much it. I think it is really annoying when people post and have long talks.”

Advertising is a key way that Facebook will monetize its 751 million mobile users.   Earlier this year, the number of active daily visitors checking Facebook on mobile devices surpassed people checking the social network on the web.

Photos are still the most popular item of personal content that we share right now with nearly 550 million+ photos shared each day on various internet services and this is expected to double within the next 12 months.

Advertising in the News Feed has moved towards bigger pictures and richer media and it will continue to go in that direction.

Neuroscientists explain that synapses occur inside the brain when we’ve made a connection between various different things. The more random the components connected, the more synapses occur. Synapses are the basis of creativity. In other words, synapses firing equals creative joy. As kids, that happens all the time because everything is new. Everything is unlike. And we aren’t constrained by the rules about what “goes together.” Why else was putting the Barbie in the toy car wash more fun than putting the car in the car wash? The visual web frees us to return to this childlike state, where we can adventure through a whole array of different, seemingly unrelated images and clips--be they old, new, from a world away or own backyard--sparking our all-important synapses and helping us come up with new combinations and ideas so easily.

The only thing better than going on this journey of discovery is sharing it with others. This “gift” of sharing contributes to an energy exchange that amplifies our own pleasure--and is something we’re hardwired to do.

start thinking like a creator, less like an advertiser. While posting the glossy photos from the photo shoot or :30 spots online may be part of your approach, it shouldn’t be your entire approach. Think content, not commercials.

Help us rediscover the beauty of a forgotten familiar. Find something familiar--in your product, brand, or from people’s lives--and help us see it in a fascinating new light. It could be as simple as taking a kitchen appliance and turning it into a science experiment or reminding people to capture just one second of their daily lives and compile a beautiful montage.

Search for your brand online. Chances are your fans are already mixing and mashing your brand with something seemingly unrelated. Build on it, fuel it, steer it, and help us make more with it.

Ditch the pitch. Instead, start an energy exchange. Create content that reminds us of our own capacity for excitement, happiness, and vivacity so we want to share in it with others.

the closer you are to earning a free coffee, the more frequently you’ll purchase a cup.

even the illusion of progress causes the same accelerating effect. In the same study, one set of coffee shop customers received a 12-stamp loyalty card, with two pre-existing bonus stamps, while the other got a regular 10-stamp card. Who purchased 10 drinks faster for their free coffee? The 12-stamp cardholders, by three days.

motivation and performance slow down right after a goal is achieved

the solution is deliberate practice, the kind of intensely focused, introspective practice that results in mastery, expertise, and virtuosity. What’s fascinating about this kind of practice is that it doesn’t require that you drive yourself into the ground. The best violinists, for example, practice no more than four-and-a-half hours a day and otherwise prioritize rest and rejuvenation.

the critical factor of deliberate practice is intention. Your goal itself must be improvement--achieved through a combination of knowing your weaknesses, self-monitoring, analysis, study, and experimentation.

Marketers are already confronting the implications of a more shadowy Internet, specifically the phenomenon known as DarkSocial and DarkSearch.

“DarkSocial,” estimates that 69% of the publication’s social traffic is dark--meaning users who access content by clicking on a link emailed or IMed to them. Marketers don’t know where these users came from or what exactly drove them to their website.

cloud services like Google and Apple are proactively stripping referral data out when sending users to third party sites via search. These DarkSearch visitors, like their DarkSocial counterparts, also end up in the “direct referral” bucket of analytics reporting, indistinguishable from the geography-less visitors who typed your domain name directly into their browsers to visit your site.

In the near-term, brands will have to confront a potentially darker Internet, as the roadblocks to data-driven marketing thrown up by DarkSocial, DarkSearch and an emerging DarkNet increase. There will be real consequences, including in investments in marketing, if it becomes more difficult to quantify customer engagement.

In the longer-term, we may see a nascent e-commerce system more familiar to science fiction fans (and current users of services like Silk Road, the online illegal drug marketplace). Imagine a future Amazon.com-like e-commerce site where all profiles are anonymous, all payments utilize crypto-currencies, and all deliveries of physical goods use inexpensive, multi-hop services that conceal the ultimate end delivery address behind anonymous dropboxes.

More than half of Gen C use the internet as their main source of entertainment, and 66% spend the same or more time watching online video as watching television [2].

Conversation drives Gen C, especially when it’s aligned with their interests. They are hungry for content that they can share and spread, no matter where it comes from: other people, content providers, brands.

The majority -- 85% -- of Gen C relies on peer approval for their buying decisions [2]. The under 35 set will be 40% of the population by 2020. But more importantly, by then, we’ll all likely be Gen C.

Gen C has a camera in their pockets, so the stuff they capture and curate looks more common, ordinary, even pointless at times. But the ordinary-ness of it all is what is extraordinary. Pictures of the everyday-ness around them allow them to find new meaning, as if they are seeing things for the first time.

Giving them a way to add their own uniqueness to an experience gives them a reason to add it to the collage of their lives.

They record every detail and then curate that content to reflect their personal values and how they see the world. In fact, 1 in 4 upload a video every week and nearly half upload a photo every week [2]. It’s their way of controlling how they want to be perceived by others

Giving them content that matches their definition of quality has become their expectation, not a nice to have.

Well-thought-out, useful and interesting branded content has more opportunity than ever to contribute meaning to people’s everyday lives. But there is also greater risk than ever from messaging that doesn’t feel authentic, relevant, personalized, and participatory.

Gen C wants to give us signals of their interest. They are looking to connect directly with brands that create experiences that offer something relevant and valuable, and they expect that we’ll be ready and willing to act on those signals and continuously improve the quality of our interactions with them.

Rather than starting by thinking about how to reach or broadcast to as many people as possible to get to those who matter, what if we began with engaging those who matter the most. We could prioritize surfacing the 5% — and make our entire plan better by learning from their interactions and leaning on their advocacy to expand our reach in a smarter way. We wouldn’t be abandoning “reach”; we’d be reorienting our thinking towards greater “engaged reach”?

By turning the reach-driven funnel upside down, we’re in effect creating an ‘engagement pyramid’. The engagement pyramid isn’t just about retention and growth of our existing customer base. It’s about starting with the 5% who will be most interested in what we have to say and most willing to speak for us. This group not only includes current customers, but also those most likely to influence others toward your brand.

you need to be “always on” because Gen C is “always on”.

Prioritize content, beyond commercials

Some of today’s most successful brands realize the power of their fans to help generate content that they in turn surface to a broader group.

And now, after we voluntarily put all our data in someone else’s keeping, alternately trusting and ignoring them when they told us how they can read it but wouldn’t dare, could sell it but don’t need to, might disclose it to the government but only if they have to, we’re finding out they’ve been doing all this and more the whole time. We’ve been pouring our data into the river for years and just pretending there was no one downstream.

I believe we are going to decentralize and cellularize once we realize how needlessly dependent on distant and dubiously beneficial third parties.

In a way, we want the opposite of Pandora’s box. Something that, once shut, no one can open but us: Pandora’s lockbox.

the direction of development in the tech sector really does seem geared towards trivialities.

Here, then, is the real question: where is the breakthrough device or software that decouples our data from the oppressive web 2.0 superstructure with no loss to functionality? One might ask: where is the Napster for privacy?

The networks that we have come to rely on were once only possible through powerful intermediaries. But what was once symbiotic has become parasitic, and those intermediaries have now outlasted their usefulness and squandered whatever trust they conned out of us when we were given the choice between tainted privilege and safe obsolescence. We did it their way. It’s time to take the highway.