Posted a new article on the Van Eldijk Studio’s website about picking the right webdesigner for the right project. Check it out (Dutch).

If I would have to pick one life motto it would be ‘under promise and overachieve’. The concept is simple: You promise next to nothing and deliver a lot. If you tell someone ‘This will be done tomorrow’ and you get it done the day after tomorrow they will probably be pissed because you didn’t deliver. What if you had promised them it would be done late next week and you delivered it the day after tomorrow? They would be delighted! It’s as easy as that. Still, game developers can’t seem to grasp this easy concept.

I’m a gamer. So I check the news on game websites quite frequently. Everyday some news item pops up with a game developer (or executive) running his mouth claiming this game they are working on is the best we’ve seen yet. “You can do this and that and when you do this… this will blow your mind!” And it does! It’s truly amazing what they are promising, and in most cases the game does deliver. But the WOW-factor isn’t there any more. I already expected it to be in the game. I’ve already become accustomed to the fact that I’m able to do that kind of stuff. And most of the time it sounds great but when you’re playing the game it becomes boring pretty quickly. A great example is Assassins Creed. When the first gameplay movies were released every gamer was drooling. But when you play the actual game the features become repetitive and annoying. I understand there needs to be some kind of buzz about the game so that it can become a big seller on the day it’s released but please keep some features a secret. Let us gamers experience the WOW-factor when we are playing the game so we can tell all their friends. Leverage the power of word to mouth. Under promise and overachieve, I bet it will work out great.

Drama. It’s all about the drama. The football industry is one big Soap opera! Every where you look there is (possible) conflict: Team versus Team, Player versus Player, Coach versus Coach, Coach versus Player, Coach versus Team, Team versus Player, etc. The relationship between these parties is what makes football a great story. And we humans like a good story, it’s the way we are wired.

From our early years of existence we are telling each other stories, either by drawing on the inside of a cave, painting a picture, writing a book, directing a movie or developing a game. The world of football is filled with intriguing story lines. They become so dramatic that writers of Soap opera’s can’t even imagine that kind of misery. Without the story football becomes dull. Nobody wants to see two random teams kick a ball for ninety minutes. We want to see the internal battle. We want to see the player who got substituted throw his water bottle at the coach. We want to see two life long friends making hard tackles just because they play in the opposite team. We want to see players sent off because they couldn’t stop yelling at the referee. We want to see a player leave his club for the rival club on the other side of town.

So ladies, next time your man tells you he wants to watch a World Cup Football match: go sit next to him on that couch. And ask him about the players. Ask him about the ‘story’. And maybe, just maybe, football might not be so boring after all.

I’ve created a small one page website about the Dutch Football team participating in the World Cup 2010 in South Africa. The website provides an overview of played or upcoming matches, latest news about the Dutch football team and tweets which contain words such as ‘Oranje’ and ‘Nederlands elftal’. The website was made with Joomla and took me a couple of hours. So if you want to have a simple overview about the Netherlands kicking ass in South Africa go to http://www.wkinzuidafrika.nl. Don’t forget to share it with your friends, family and colleagues! Hup Holland Hup!

Following my post on how we need to stop touching and start talking with our machines I want to emphasise the fact how this is done in videogames. Videogames have a lot of elements which can be useful for our day to day interfaces. A little game called ‘Scribblenauts’ for the Nintendo DS is a great example. The object of the game is simple: You are a little guy called Max and your goal is to get a ‘starlite’ which is placed in a level. Boring, you might think, but the fun part is you can spawn any object you can think of in order to get this starlite! You have to ‘talk’ (type in words) to your Nintendo DS and the game understands you. In one of the first levels a starlite is stuck in a tree. An obvious choice would be a ladder, but why be so uncreative? Why not spawn an axe? Or a chainsaw? And why should you do all the hard work? Type in ‘lumberjack’ and all you have to do is wait untill the lumberjack takes down the tree so you can get the starlite. The more creative you are the more points you get.

This game is revolutionary, not only for the game industry but in the way we interact with machines. Scribblenauts gives you so much freedom. Imagine if Scribblenauts was purely touch-based and you had to scroll through all the available objects (which I guess must be thousands). First of all the game would be less fun and second of all it takes a long time to find the right object. Sribblenauts gives us a little peek into the future of how great games (and interfaces) can be.

(P.S: If you ever play Scribblenauts first spawn ‘God’ and then ‘Satan’ and see what happens!)

Yesterday Google announced Google TV on their yearly Google I/O event.  Google TV will try to achieve what many companies have tried before: Combine the Web with the TV. The utopian vision is neatly explained in this two minute youtube video. My guess is that this concept will fail. No matter how much I love Google and how often I use their products, I bet this will be a venture they will soon try to forget. Let me explain why:

• TV is a passive medium. The great thing about TV is that you can sit down and zap. No interaction needed! Trying to make it an active medium with tons of things to do will confuse the user.
• Google TV offers you freedom of choice. You can now choose between millions of clips, video’s, shows, movies, etc. But this freedom of choice will only cripple the user. It is very hard to choose because it might just be possible you make the wrong decision. You only have a limited time each day to watch TV so what should you watch? Old passive TV is very simple. Don’t like what you see? ZAP! Also, you can easily get an overview of all the content showing that evening so you can make a decision on what to watch and what to miss.
• Sometimes I already try to browse on my TV. But it’s just a painful experience. The resolution is too low so it’s hard to read anything. Also to have a good browsing experience you need a keyboard and a mouse. So if Google TV hasn’t got a good solution for this problem the whole browsing ability of Google TV will be pretty useless.
• Beneath my TV are three boxes (Set-top, receiver, DVD player) already. I don’t want to add another box! And I certainly don’t want to buy a new TV with integrated Google TV. I just bought a new one two years ago. The fact that you have to use extra hardware for Google TV will be another obstacle a lot of users just don’t want to take.

Of course, it’s easy to just be critical and shoot. So I want to share an idea on how Google TV might become a success:

• You have to be able to socialize with your friends via Google TV. As I said the freedom of choice will be a problem, so there needs to be a good recommendation system. ‘If you liked this than you will probably also like this…’. Knowing Google this will probably be available in Google TV. But they need to take it further. It would be great if you have the ability to recommend content to your friends and visa versa. Or to watch a show simultaneously with ‘virtual’ friends and communicate about the show. This way watching TV will become a whole new experience and we might accept that TV is becoming less passive and more active.

What do you think, am I wrong or right? Let me know in the comments!

A long time ago we, humanity, drew an animal on a cavewall and pointed and grunted at it. Somewhere down the line we invented the Alphabet and speech. But the last few decades, starting with the first Graphical User Interface, we are back to pointing and (sometimes) grunting again. We mainly use a mouse to command our machines and with the touchscreen devices we don’t even bother working with a mouse anymore. We just point at the screen all the time. In 1996 Jakob Nielsen and Don Gentner wrote an article (The Anti-Mac interface) about the Graphical User Interface in which they already point (no pun intended) out this problem. Fourteen years! In light of that article we’ve really gone downhill. Devices are being reduced to one big screen where pointing is the only option.

There are some bright points though. The mobile phone OS Android by Google is already implementing voice recognition in a workable way. Which is hard to do because of the many different languages which all have many different accents. But we need to push it further, we need to re-introduce the command line!

For example: You have a folder with images but you want to move all the images which are bigger than a certain size (between 1MB and 2MB) moved to another folder. On top of that you want to remove all the images which are bigger than 2MB. How great would it be if you could just type (or ask) the following: “Remove all images bigger than 2MB but put the ones between 1MB and 2MB in a different folder named ‘Big pics’.”

Already there are some great examples of applications which understand our (complicated) human semantics. Such as Ubiquity, a Firefox Plugin which is can be controlled with text commands making it easier for the user to navigate. But the best of all is Google. Google understands human talk. A very good example (taken from this article in Wired) is the following query: “hot dog”. Google understands you are looking for the food product and it understands that you are not intersted in boiling puppies. Look at it this way: imagine Google was touch-only and you had to click your way to the right result. It would take hours for you to get the desired result, so why are we so easy to accept this with other devices/services?

Currently we are in an interface paradigm which is dominated by touch. The paradigm is kept alive because we are too lazy. We’ve taken a long time to get accustomed to this paradigm so why throw it all away? Hopefully we will come to our senses so that we can stop touching and start talking with our machines.

Every time a new technology is introduced the majority of the people are skeptical. How can we use this and do we really need this? I remember ten years ago when the mobile phone became populair. I also remember me being against it. I despised guys or girls showing off their new mobile phones and 8-bit ringtones. I still hate the ringtones but I’m a vivid smartphone user. Back then I just couldn’t see the advantages and now I can’t live without it. The same is happening to Twitter. How can a service which limits you to 140 characters a post be of any value? It’s looks like a tool for exhibitionists wanting to vent their whole life. Slowly but surely we come to see what Twitter is really capable of. This became clear to me last week. I got a call from my girlfriend telling me that a colleague of her was stranded on the Utrecht Central train station because of a bomb threat. I had to travel to Utrecht that day so I checked the biggest Dutch news website (nu.nl) to see if there were any reports. Nothing. A search on Google also returned irrelevant results. I went to twitter.com and typed in “Utrecht” in the big search box and instantly I got all the information I wanted. Twitter users posting updates about the bomb threat were in abundance. Every second 50 new bits of information were added. I got to see pictures taken with mobile phones of the secluded area’s. I got the latest updates on what police officers were telling the public. This is the way citizen journalism works. The hive mind gave me a lot of information very quickly. That beings said it is important to be careful with the information being posted on Twitter. The facts are not checked and the information may be false which, for instance, can lead to celebrities being declared dead who are still much alive. Even Though Twitter is proving to be very valuable for citizen journalism and journalism as a whole. Next time I want to be updated on the latest information of an event I know where I’m going: Twitter.

Once there was a war between the search engines. We all know who the won that war: Google. We can hardly remember what we used before Google (Altavista? Yahoo?). A new war is raging. Facebook is stepping up and is putting the pressure on Google. But it’s Google throwing the first punch.

Last week a lot of Google  Software Engineers deactivated their Facebook accounts. This exodus started because of to the announcement on Facebook’s F8 conference concerning the change in privacy settings. Facebook is opening up to third party sites (such as Yelp) to make your surfing a more personal experience. This move by Google’s employees is interesting because the whole things looks orchestrated. Is this a spontaneous reaction or were these Google workers encouraged?

The decision by Facebook to open up is making the social website a serious competitor for Google. The way Google indexes the web is very theoritical, very ‘mechanical’. The 100+ factors in the algorhythm decide the ranking of websites depending on the search query. The machine is the boss. Facebook is going to do the opposite. It is now possible for website owners to place a Facebook ‘I like it’ button on their website. This way the website which is ‘liked’ the best will get higher in the rankings. An added layer is that you see how your (Facebook) friends have interacted with the website you’re looking at. So instead of asking help of a machine (Google) with a search query you now turn to your friends (Facebook). What do they reccomend? Which websites do they like? This technique is not new (delicious is already doing this) but the big difference is the huge user base. Some sources even claim that Facebook’s traffic is surpassing Google’s. This in combination with the opening up to third parties is creating a very powerfull new way to surf the web. If we now look at the Google developers shutting down their accounts in perspective it looks like a pre-emptive strike. To openly question Facebook’s privacy settings and make a public stance means the war has started. Or maybe it already started when Facebook denied Google from crawling their website? Anyway the next couple of years we are going to see some fireworks with Google and Facebook going head to head.

In the end we, the users, are always the winners because this means both parties have to be creative and innovative to obtain a loyal userbase. So I encourage this battle: Go war!

Don’t get me wrong. The iPhone is a great device and if someone asks me advice on which phone to buy I usually recommend the iPhone or (if battery life is an issue) a good old indestructable Nokia. And this coming from a big Android fanboy! Why? The iPhone is the best smartphone if you want to have a good experience and don’t care too much about tweaking and restrictions. I compare it with a golden cage: it’s great but you’re locked inside. And because of this reason the Android phones will (eventually) beat the iPhone. Here are my main reasons:

• The hardware and software are not sold seperately. Remember why Microsoft kicked Apple’s ass when it came to the Operating System battle? Microsoft made Windows available to every PC. Any PC manufacturer could pre-install Windows on their machines. As a result the OS was very widespread very fast. Apple just couldn’t keep up because if you bought an Apple computer you also bought the Mac OS. This decision nearly killed Apple. The same is happening with the iPhone. If you like the phone but hate the software you are screwed. You don’t have an option! Deal with it. Android is becoming availble rapidly on many phones. It is not restricted to one phone.  The Android market share is growing very fast and it seems history is repeating.
• Steve Jobs is watching you(r apps). Apple (and I even think Steve Jobs personally) checks every app before it becomes available in the App store. This means they can censor anything they don’t like. Such apps as Skype, Google Voice or any number of apps. As an App developer you have to invest a lot of time and money into developing an App for the iPhone in hope the Apple Dictators will approve. Android works like a democracy. Anyone can add an App to the market and the people who try the Apps can rate them. Bad apps get low ratings so they will filter out eventually.

This being said Android has a long way to go. It looks a bit clunky and doesn’t have the WOW factor you get when you play with the iPhone. You have to tweak a lot to get a good experience. And with all the different Android versions circulating it’s hard to keep up (for users and developers). Hopefully Android will be improved and have this issues resolved quickly so it can start being the number one mobile Operating System.