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What’s Next… in Experience Design: Digital leaps forward

The User Experience team is hard at work getting ready to put on our first What’s Next… event of the year on 29th February and it’s shaping up to be an ambitious one!

What’s Next… in Experience Design
Digital leaps forward

The event brings speakers in our Brick Lane space to lead a series of seminars around 5 themes:

  • Mobilemergent
    The rise of the use of mobile devices, both in the West and in developing countries. Where is mobile taking humanity? Where are the glowing rectangles leading us?
  • Businesstrategy
    The rise of disruptive business models. Darwinism goes digital – how will businesses adapt or die?
  • Politicsociety
    The social and cultural impacts of the internet’s development. Ushahidi. The Arab Spring. #riotcleanup. The new possibilities for power. Has the revolution been digitised? What will the next phenomenon be?
  • Creativitech
    Creative technology, home brew tech and 3D printing. The PC revolution began in enthusiasts’ garages. Is creative technology the new cottage industry?
  • Gamentertainment
    Gamification, game theory and game design trends such as location-based services. Will our most difficult problems be solved through play? What’s next for MMORPGs? And what the hell will it take to make the telly interesting again?

Find out more about the event here.
The first 100 tickets were snapped up in just 2 days. But more will be released in the next few weeks, for tickets please watch our EventBrite page (The event is free, there are no speakers’ fees).

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Shoreditch Vogue

For our Winter Party next week we’ve decided to go all glamorous, with a fabulous venue and amazing view. Inspired by the colours, fashions and moves of Miami Vice, Dynasty and the 80s Brat Pack, we’re bringing the exoticism of London’s East End. So we’re almost set to put in our shoulder pads, get the red lippy, find the shiny suits, pull on the white socks and dance like it’s 1989!

Keep an eye here and on our Facebook page for photos from the night.

Ta!

 

 

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In 2012…

LBi delivers a message from the future, telling of the strange and wonderful world that awaits us in 2012.

A vision of 2012
Thanks to x-ray delta (James Vaughan)

In 2012… The internet is the 5th dimension

Everything is connected to everything, and people can interact with the internet easily and seamlessly.

The 5th dimension is the result of several trends combined: the rise of internet-enabled everyday objects, verbal and gestural interfaces, and contactless information transfer (i.e. NFC). These three trends came together to create a world in which smart functions live in the objects that surround you, rather than simply in apps on a mobile device, and interacting with them requires the wave of a hand and not the tapping of a finger (on a keyboard, a button or a touchscreen). NFC has helped to connect people to their smart objects, enabling smartphones to act as portable screens for everything else.

In 2012… We all work on the toilet

Cloud computing, the remote storage of information that can be accessed from any device with a working internet connection, has heralded a new era of productivity.

Our software and our documents, freed from their association with a single device, are seamlessly accessible as we move from place to place. This has allowed us to rid our lives of moments of uselessness, such as those spent in lifts, on public transport, or in lavatories. This trend, known sometimes as smart boredom, is not just about increased efficiencies in the workforce; it can potentially benefit anyone. The success of smartphone gaming has allowed people to fill their moments of forced inactivity with fun. The cloud expands these possibilities to include other useful tasks, be they for your home life or your work life.

In 2012… We live in a cloud-based commune

A side effect of the utility provided by cloud computing has been a shift in company business models from selling digital products, to leasing digital products.

With more and more physical possessions being replaced by digital counterparts, the impact of this change from owning to borrowing has been significant. The cloud has enabled companies to remove the burden of ownership from the masses. What was previously owned, the common man now receives as a service in exchange for micropayments.

In 2012… Everyone loves adverts

The use of personal activity data has made it possible to provide people with only the advertising and information that is relevant to their interests and contextual needs.

By collecting information from your activity in search, ecommerce and social media, and combining it with other contextual information, such as location, time of day and time of year, companies can now ensure that only the most interesting and useful information is presented to you. This has changed the dynamic of spam and advertising. Once seen as an irritant, adverts are now thought of as a service.

In 2012… We grow our own fridges

Companies collaborate with their customers to develop new ideas.

Instead of simply going out or online and buying a fridge, consumers now have the option to participate in the designing of their next fridge. This benefits both the company and the consumers, in that the products more closely reflect the desires of the consumers. Furthermore, the process of co-creation encourages people to become invested in the success of the product, which in turn can have a positive effect on brand advocacy. The very fact of being open to consumer participation and demonstrating that the company is interested in its customers’ opinions can help to increase public opinion.

In 2012… We play games without realising

Gamification has developed beyond the most obvious and colourful implementations to a more subtle use of the underlying psychology.

In 2011 most implementations of gamification (the process of using game design techniques to make other processes more engaging) have focussed on applying surface elements of games, such as badges and leaderboards. In 2012 gamification has moved on to applying psychological lessons from game design without the end product necessarily resembling a game. This has made it possible to gamify a broader range of processes, including ones that might not suit obvious game elements.

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Merry GIFmas

What’s the last thing you need a Christmas? Probably lots of things if you think about it, but how about a silly animated GIF for starters. step forward the GIFshop.

Our seasonal stupidity comes in the form of a GIFshop – a place to obtain some of the fairest animated creations this side of ruler bar. You can tweet it, like it, +1 it or even embed it. And if you really like it make a small donation to the charity its supporting. Visitors are also invited to submit their own gifs too.

Shelter charity Great Ormond Street Hospital Maggies cancer caring centres

We’ll match the donations (up to a total of £2000) and announce the winning GIF with much fanfare of course.

Because this Christmas it really is better to GIF than receive.

We also invited a few of the capital’s finest Creative Directors to submit – with all but one strangely declining to get involved – bar humbug. So many thanks to Ed Robinson and Rob at The Viral Factory for providing a few gems.

The whole project was concocted from a blended mixture of suggested ideas from our 5 UK offices to hopefully put a smile on people’s faces. A big shout out to the team that turned it quickly around.

It would seem the animated GIF meme was going strong this festive season with TBWA New York giving the World holidaygifgiver.com with added Chrimbo jumper, and Skittles providing their GIF rap (GifRapTheRainbow.com) courtesy of BBDO Toronto.

So as the line goes this Christmas this really is the GIF that keeps on giving.

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A year of Windows Phone

I have been using Windows Phone for well over a year now both for personal use and business use and have been impressed by what it has on offer from an ever-improving operating system, a very nice user experience to a maturing phone ecosystem. There has already been much said of Windows Phone and I would say that most of its been positive. Much to my surprise though, market share has dropped to 1.5% compared to 2.5% last year. Putting that stat to one side for now, 2011 has been quite significant for Windows Phone as it’s seen a major update to the software, thousands of apps being published, a variety of newer handsets, huge support for developers/designers and a considerable partnership with Nokia, all of which has put it in a good position to push on in 2012 and gain an increase in market share.
 

Here are some of my highlights of Windows Phone:

User Interface
I just love the new UI in Windows Phone! The Phone team at Microsoft introduced a completely redesigned UI called Metro. Metro has been given a big thumbs up by the creative and user experience community through its use of simple, clean, tiled interface that does a good job of presenting lots of dynamic real-time content consistently on mobile/tablet devices, desktop LCD’s or television screens.
 

 

Metro is now being used as the UI on Microsoft’s highly anticipated new operating system Windows 8 and is already on its way to xBox. The picture below from winrumors.com shows Metro UI on Windows 8, Windows Phone and xBox Live.

 

 

Let’s get Social
A major new functionality, introduced by the mango software update, is the social network integration. This bring in social integration capabilities with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and xBox Live.
I absolutely love this feature as my phone contacts list now has the likes of Charlie Sheen, Robin Van Persie, Richard Branson alongside my LBi colleagues and my mum :-)
 

 

Apps and Marketplace
Let’s face it, a decent smartphone isn’t really decent unless it has the ability to discover, find and download applications…. and lots of them! There are now over 45,000 apps on the Windows Phone ‘app store’ otherwise known as Marketplace.

With the recent Mango update as mentioned earlier, the IE mobile browser got upgraded and now supports HTML5. That means Windows Phone now joins the other major phone players in the market for running websites that have been developed in HTML5.

 

Developers, Developers, Developers
The thousands of apps available to download across Apple App Store, Windows Phone Marketplace, Android Market, wouldn’t be possible without skilling up mobile application developers. Over the last 18 months Microsoft has made quite a large investment in the developer community by providing dev tools, learning kits, training and running developer courses and events globally.

Earlier this year, LBi was selected as the exclusive London digital agency partner to host the London Windows Phone Camps at our Truman Brewery offices. These dev camps have been very successful with the last camp reaching record numbers.

 

 

The Nokia partnership
2011 has seen a partnership between Microsoft and Nokia and the emergence of new Nokia smartphones running Windows Phone operating system. This was a very good move by both companies and exactly what they needed to compete with Google and Apple. The recent London launch of the Nokia Lumia phone shows just how serious Nokia are of the partnership and importance of gaining a market share in the smartphone race.

 

 

Well there you go, some of my highlights of Windows Phone in 2011. Windows Phone must be doing something right because just the other day I talked about some of the above with mates who are big time iPhone and Android fans and even they were impressed saying how Windows Phone had really caught up with the competition.

I think so too.

 

Thanks for reading and have an amazing 2012!

Riaz  (@TheRealRiaz)

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