With the level of success the KEEN Footwear ecommerce site has had in the US, we knew it was only a matter of time before we’d take it across the pond. After brushing up on our German and French, studying European tax rates and practicing our international business relations, we are excited to announce that you can now shop KEEN online in Europe!

Our challenge was to provide the same unique and creative shopping experience as the US site, but tailored to the specific needs of the European market. The result? An awesomely integrated shopping site that allows consumers to select their country, shop in English, German or French and purchase products directly from the KEEN Europe headquarters.

This project has been another illustration of the incredible partnership we’ve had with the team at KEEN, now including KEEN Europe.

To celebrate the launch, simultaneous toasts took place in Oregon, Texas and The Netherlands. (There’s nothing like a glass of champagne at 4am, west coast time!)

Spend your buck, Pound or Euro on anything KEEN at www.keenfootwear.com.

KEEN Europe Team

Wright Strategies Portland Team

In our offices, we’ve got folks on the iPhone, Blackberry and Android. We’re always peeking at them during site development to make sure our sites aren’t completely useless to one of the fastest growing user markets.

One thing we continually notice is that often times, a mobile app is much more usable on our devices than a full website. Let’s face it – the screens are tiny, our fingers are giant and clumsy and when sites aren’t optimized for these devices, browsing them can get frustrating in a hurry.

Here’s an example of a mobile app on the iPhone for a news aggregation site called Fark (where I enjoy getting my humorous sports news headlines) and the same full website as viewed on a mobile browser. The advantage to using the app is that I can see the text without zooming, click easily and quickly access relevant content, or the main reason I visit Fark’s Sports headlines.

Fark App:

If I visit the full website on my phone, I get a junky experience. The site is unreadable without zooming: I have to move the screen to read anything when I am zoomed in, and I have to wait for extra graphics, banners and ads to load on the screen.

Fark Full Website: 

To me as a user, the advantage of the app is clear. But as a developer, it introduces the issue of possibly having to develop a website, as well as an app and maybe even a mobile version of the same site. Now it seems like I’d have to support three separate platforms for the same site. However, if sites like Fark would offer a mobile-friendly version, I’d be happy, and for the most part, both versions of the site would be fed by the same information infrastructure.

A great example of this is the mobile commerce site we developed for KEEN Footwear. By simply detecting whether someone is viewing the site on a mobile device, we are able to provide a simplified HTML experience within the browser that essentially delivers the same advantages of a mobile app! Clean, simple, readable.

KEEN Mobile Site:

As a developer and provider, developing a mobile version of a site is the clear winner. Regardless of the device, users get a pleasing, streamlined experience, without the provider having to support apps for an array of devices and platforms.

One of the kickoff panels for SXSWi this year was run by Paul Boag, Creative Director of Headscape, a web agency based in England. The objective of his panel was not, as many thought, to make the design phase of a project pain free for designers, but to make it an easy, pleasing process for clients.

Boag noted that as designers, we sometimes fall into the trap of being defensive during the design process. He suggested the following collaborative techniques for ensuring a pain free experience for clients, and developers alike. 

Six Tips for Pain Free Design Signoff

1. Ensure the client understands their role in the project. Starting with the kickoff meeting, reiterate that the client's job is to find problems, not solutions.
2. Have a strong methodology and instill confidence in the project by making sure your development process is clearly outlined to the client.
3. Include the client often and early so that they feel engaged in the progress and development of the project. 
4. Educate your client about design decisions. Explain and justify your final decisions so the client will be confident and able to explain changes to other stakeholders or superiors.
5. Ask for specific kinds of feedback from the client. Target your questions so that you and the client can finish strong. Focus on the end result: “Will users like this?” “Does this fulfill our original design objectives?”
6. Avoid saying “no” during the process. Be open to discussing and negotiating prospective changes.

Over the years we’ve learned to adopt many of the principles Boag discussed. Involving our clients as team members during the design phase has eliminated the element of “surprise” that often comes from designing an entire website internally, then releasing it to the client in one single chunk. We also see it as our duty to keep our clients involved, as a measure of good customer service, allowing team work and “buy in” at important design phases.

As designers, it’s important that we keep our eye on the prize: the target user for our finished product. During SXSWi, I sat in on a panel that highlighted some of the core concepts to keep in mind when designing and developing the first interaction a user has with your website. While geared toward the designer, these tactics can help the entire development team work together to create a fun, enticing user experience.

Tips for Designing the First 15 Minutes:

• Design with empathy. Remember what it’s like to visit your site for the very first time. Not everyone knows what’s expected of them.
• Give users the fun stuff first, and then ask them to save their work. Wait until there’s something to save.
• Integrate instructional and educational pieces into your initial user processes.
• Always look at your processes again with fresh eyes.

Some sites that do it right:

• Geni.com – “Best of breed” account creation and an easy progress saving system
• Mint.com – Super quick checkboxes and congratulatory feedback let you know you are progressing correctly
• Linkedin.com – Progress bar for account creation incentivizes users to keep going
• Tumblr.com – Quick and simple account setup

I can’t tell you how many times it’s happened to me: I’m checking my iPhone at red lights and on the side of the street. I enter my destination in a map or web search, and bam – they’ve got a website. I anxiously click the link, eager to learn the missing piece of information, and I am rewarded with a blank screen with a small blue Lego block in the center... nothing else! What? How can this be? Did the designer/developer of this site, really develop the ENTIRE site in Flash? Come on…even the navigation?

Today, more than ever, it’s become vital for businesses to adhere to some of the most basic web strategies, to ensure this doesn’t happen to every customer who has the luxury of looking you up on the iPhone. It’s part of the reason we advocate for developing two separate sites: One for desktop users, and another for your mobile users. Why not spend a portion of your web budget to ensure an optimal browsing experience regardless of how someone chooses to view your site? There’s no need to download huge images and rich media if you are in a car and just need basic contact information. On the flip side, the desktop/home user would prefer to see the large, beautiful photography and a more complex user experience.

We need to recognize our audiences, and many of them are beginning to rely heavily on mobile browsing. Not providing a mobile-friendly version of your website is making a conscious choice to ignore the fastest growing web browsing audience in the world. If you're interested in our mobile website development services, you can learn more here, or visit m.keenfootwear.com to see a mobile commerce site in action. 

In the world of web design, we’ve thankfully moved beyond the days of having to use a 256 “web-safe” color palette. These days I can help our clients develop visual experiences on the web that are more full-featured and visually rich. With broadband becoming the norm, load times are almost a thing of the past. Transparency effects are a cinch with PNGs, and Flash will let us get away with almost anything.

So what’s left to worry about in the design department? My biggest challenge is the environment in which you view my design.

I know exactly what my layout looks like on my 20” high-definition flat panel monitor in an office illuminated with incandescent lighting. But how does that same layout translate to a 19” CRT monitor under fluorescent lights?

Because of the differences in our visual environments we’re finding that it’s still important to consider all the basic design elements to develop a successful layout that can succeed in different viewing environments for me and my client. Not to mention my client’s customers.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I own a web development agency, and I am lucky if I check my Facebook account once a month. I feel ashamed. Because when I do check my page, I find myself being an avid consumer of everyone else’s updates and photos, but then I’m too busy to put anything new up about myself. I’ll toss a photo or two up every month or so, but I enjoy seeing what all my other friends are up to, and where they’ve been. I guess in that way I am quite voyeuristic.

In the micro-blogging world, Twitter has become a competitive environment where I feel challenged to be as creative or funny as many of the people I follow. It’s quicker and easier to contribute. I read tweets from people like Shaquille O’Neal (who is actually really funny!) and it feels so strange that he’s telling me what an NBA superstar is doing in his regular day-to-day life. It feels like I’m being a Peeping Tom, but it’s okay. We’ve all signed up for it. I never rooted for the guy as a basketball player, but I love hearing him chat about random stuff. It’s my glimpse behind the magic curtain.

We’ve begun to advise the majority of our clients to do the same thing: embrace Twitter as a way to give real information to customers in an easy-to-digest format. It’s an easy way to share behind-the-scenes information: stuff that will excite and entice people. So why not jump out there and direct some of the traffic yourself? It only takes 140 characters.

I once listened to a world-renowned game developer discuss the importance of happiness in our daily lives. She predicted that within the next 5 years, the ability to provide products and services that promote happiness and well-being would be the primary metric for measuring success.

A lot of the work we’ve been doing with KEEN Footwear recently has reminded me just how important happiness can be to the process of completing a purchase online. The custom shopping experience we created for KEEN has an array of features that aren’t “necessary” to each purchase, but they go a long way in building a unique experience for each customer. With each customer account comes a KEEN Closet: a visual representation of a closet full of outdoor gear and the products purchased by that customer. “See with Jeans” is another interactive feature allowing customers to see what shoes will look like with a pair of light or dark jeans.

We developed the features to help KEEN stand out from the crowd, and have received great feedback on these extra bells and whistles. With the number of online shopping outlets exploding, it’s vital that our clients’ sites shine and provide an extra splash of “happiness” even when completing an otherwise ordinary task. I believe interactive games and entertainment really are spilling over into the traditional online marketing space, and it’s our job to keep finding new ways to provide unexpected happiness where we can.

By the time I had sat through my third panel discussion at this year’s SXSW Interactive festival moderated or participated in by someone listed as “John Smith, Director of UX,” I was like “OK, does UX stand for what I think it does?” Yup. UX = User Experience.

As the web evolves and becomes a media-rich environment with so many ways to interact, we’re not looking at UI (User Interface) experts or IA (Information Architecture) folks anymore to tell us how our sites should work to benefit our users. The overall user experience has become king. Interface, architecture, design, programming: toss them all in a bowl, mix well, and you’ll end up with the User Experience.

Jared Spool’s talk on the “Journey to the Center of Design” provided me three core UX attributes that ensure good product development:

• Good Vision
• Good Feedback
• Good Culture

1. Can everyone on the project team describe the experience of using your design five years from now? That’s vision, and it provides a way to measure understanding.
2. In the last six weeks, have you ACTUALLY watched people use your product, or a competitor’s product? That’s feedback, and guarantees you don’t lose the forest for the trees.
3. In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure? When you reward certain failures, you give employees a chance to LEARN without fear.  This is good culture and ensures you always thinking critically, not just cranking out the same old stuff.

When building an online product, it’s important to take the time to gauge yourself on the core attributes of UX design, to gain better understand of the experience you're creating. To learn more about these components, you can check out Spool’s presentation here.

“The Mob rules, absolutely.”

That statement was a powerful theme running through the SXSW Interactive festival this year. Using the Internet to learn and profit by shared knowledge isn’t a new phenomenon, but it seems to have taken on new life in the design community in recent years.

My eyes really DO hurt when I try to decipher what the pertinent information is on some peoples’ MySpace pages. The biggest offenders are music groups and bands…they are businesses and brands, and they are using a community-based tool to generate a public face for their business online. And more often than not, they get it wrong. But isn’t that their choice? What if a band or a small business needs a website, a logo, a graphic or art, and doesn’t want to pay a competitive price for the work to be done professionally?

Several sites have popped up over the past couple years that allow people and companies in this position to “crowd-source” projects and pay very minimally for design. And often, I am sure they will be getting exactly what they are (or aren’t) paying for.

I am excited by the possibilities community-based web graphic production offers, and at the same time feel conflicted because I cringe and wonder if we’re about to take some steps back to a 1996-like web world where it appeared hardly anyone had a designer on staff to make their site “pretty.” Getting logos and web layouts from these communities might be an inexpensive and easy way to get a job done, but I close my eyes and imagine an Internet designed by programmers, developers, writers, and NOT by trained designers. I worry that too many pages will hurt my eyes and begin to look like super-duper bedazzled MySpace pages.