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In her disappointment, she opted for buying a normal travel guidebook in a bricks and mortar bookstore. However, an idea began brewing in her mind--she was probably not the only person with this need. Why not create a product to fill that void? Like all big ideas, iwannagothere.com was born in response to a need.  Maria, an interaction designer, had all the tools necessary to bring her idea to fruition. She worked at a company in Madrid, Spain, dedicated to user experience (The Cocktail) and her colleagues were immediately enthusiastic about the project. Fernando Blat, programmer, and Manuel Muñoz, designer, embarked on the adventure of creating an online product in their free time, often skipping sleep to work out their ideas. All of them were aware that there are three basic rules to follow for any online product: keep it honest, keep it easy to use, and keep your users happy by fulfilling their needs. Hence, they made the cornerstones of the project to never publish content paid from advertisers, to ensure that the site’s design would combine beauty and functionality, and to have content created by the very users of the site. Taking advantage of their experience in completing projects for others, Maria, Fernando and Manuel made the design process of iwannagothere a democratic one. All three of them came up with ideas, gave opinions, and had a hand in writing code. They had meetings on product definition, long workshops, brainstorming sessions, and many hours in the bars around the old part of Madrid, creating prototypes on napkins. It was intellectually exhausting, but extremely fun. They knew exactly what they wanted, and for the first time ever they had no limits on time and no limited budget set by a client. Recently awarded the 2010 Webby Award for best travel website (beating out even Lonely Planet), iwannagothere collects a community of passionate travelers. The project’s motto and tagline is “This is travel, not tourism.” They are neither a travel agency nor a book publisher, but a website where users create guides based on what they like and what they have discovered, and a "place" where they can share with the world their best tips based on their travel experiences. Want: If I only had 5 minutes to spend on iwannagothere, what pages would you recommend that I visit in order to get an idea of what I might find there? Maria: I would recommend that you visit the continent page for Africa, the page for Taipei, and also the page for New York, a city for which there are tons of guides out there, but on iwannagothere you’ll find unusual tips and special information that you wouldn’t find elsewhere. iwannagothere.com is a curious mix because it takes the best aspects of a social network, a shared photo gallery, and a recommendation engine. However, it does not reward the most active users, thereby avoiding the proliferation of low-value content. They have a team of editors that review content so that it is kept clean and clear, and they don’t encourage social interaction between members. In this way, they keep to the original concept of the Project and users can trust that they will find valuable information. Basically, there are three ways to access their content: by searching for a destination, by selecting one of the guides, or by looking through the most popular posts. The guides are groupings of information based on themes that may be of interest to users. This makes it easy to find a guide for touring San Francisco by bicycle, another guide for visiting the most memorable locations from the TV series Lost, or for chocolate lovers visiting London. The guides are created by users and by several collaborators that specialize in various areas. “There is no plan in place, we give people freedom in creating them,” Says Maria. Just like the rest of the website’s content, the guides are reviewed after they are published; minor grammatical errors are corrected and any advertisements found are removed. They are unequivocal: “We are very strict with this. We do not allow any advertising content, because it goes against the most important principle of the product: credibility.” The site’s design is another aspect that grabs one’s attention. It is clean and simple, free of bells and whistles with just a touch of Web 2.0 sensibility while keeping clear of the risk of falling into the trap of hyper-modernity. It is a design that facilitates the understanding of each page by creating a clear hierarchy of information. Want: What served as your inspiration in developing the look and feel of iwannagothere? Manuel: I think that initially the nicest part of iwannagothere was that since we started off with no pretensions, our original design was meant to be of practical use to us and so every two to three months we would change it. Until we arrived at what we have now. Maintaining simplicity in our design was vital for us. In fact, at first it was so simple that it looked like there was no design at all (laughs). Since then we have made improvements while always making an effort to avoid “over-designing”. The only items that are a bit more elaborate are the contest pages, where the look and feel has more of a “marketing” feel in order to encourage participation, of course. How did you choose the color palette? And why? Green is the color that started it all. A friend made our first logo and it was green. We changed it slightly, but kept the color, which we loved, as our point of reference in establishing the rest of the palette. Blue works harmoniously with the green, and varying shades of gray provide lots of help in establishing hierarchies. How did you have such a clear vision of what iwannagothere should be? Maria: The truth is that we never thought we would get to where we are now, because what we focused on was creating the travel website we would have liked to find for our own vacations – I think that has been key. In being typical users ourselves, it was easy to decide what we would like to use. iwannagothere is a website made in Spain, so why is it in English? Because the original idea was to share the content with the whole world, and English is the universal language. It wasn’t worth it to have the website only in Spanish, because when you talk about travel you must discuss it with an international scope. How long did it take to get your site’s first version online? For eight months we only worked every once in a while on weekends, until one day we decided it was time to get serious. A month and a half after that, we had our first Beta version. In April of 2009, our company became interested in the project and found a couple of international investors for us, which gave us the freedom to dedicate all of our time to the project. As a result, we were able to open the site to the public in June of 2009. How did you decide what functionality it would have? We really have a small set of functions, since what you can do on the site is very simple. Precisely what we wanted was not to have too many functions. It is a common error in product design to have an excess of functionality when what the user needs is really much less. At iwannagothere, you can create content, consume it, save it, and follow other users. Why add anything more? Why did you program the site in Ruby On Rails? What advantages has it given you? Fernando: We were clear about choosing Rails from the beginning because it’s the framework we use at work every day and we feel comfortable with it. When you are familiar with its virtues and flaws, it’s easy. The advantage it offers is precisely its flexibility, which allows us to make changes quickly and produce functionalities and mock-ups in a very short amount of time. Another advantage of Rails is that if we come up with something that we think could work, we can develop it, put it online, and try it. If it doesn’t work, we pull it down, and that’s that. It isn’t a dramatic change, because in reality the time put into developing is very short in comparison to other frameworks. The iwannagothere team knows that the key to keeping a product alive is to never stop taking care of it. You must help it grow and limit the things that the users themselves show you are of no value. In the online world, the design process is never-ending since we can never really say that a product is finished and delivered. Evolution is constant--that’s one of the lessons that Maria and her team have learned thanks to iwannagothere. They say that they are still not over the shock of having won a Webby. Even though they are currently packing their bags to head over to New York for the prize ceremony, they haven’t stopped working. On their desks, you can find papers covered in sketches and diagrams as they are continuously testing the interface. Want: How do you know what new things to add and what to remove from iwannagothere? Maria: We rely on the site’s statistics a lot by making extensive use of web analytics. If we see that something isn’t being used then we get rid of it. We also do user surveys so that they themselves can help us improve. That is, for example, how we decided to change our navigation system to make it more intuitive, and we also added forums less than a month ago. Are there items that you have discarded because they were not being used? Yes. For example, our guides had included a function that allowed users to add the dates on which they planned to travel to that destination. When we noticed that almost no one used it, we removed the option. In this way we stay true to our almost Zen design philosophy--if something is not absolutely necessary then it is extraneous, and must be removed. What can we expect from iwannagothere in the future? Is there anything new coming up soon, some new functionality, section, etc.? Our mission in the next six months is to focus on improving the product we already have. We are not including anything new because we feel that we should spend time on maintaining, cleaning, and caring for what is already on iwannagothere. We are very careful about not falling into a creative maelstrom that would lead to us neglecting our current product. However, since we tend to be restless, we are going to be releasing an iPhone application soon, and we are already thinking about an app for the iPad. But we will move forward calmly because we only want to release an application when we feel we really understand the device and what value we can contribute to it. Is there anything you don’t like on the current iwannagothere site and that you are thinking of changing or removing? Why? I think that in terms of usability there are many things that we can keep cleaning up. There is nothing I would get rid of altogether, though there is much to improve upon. In the end, it’s like your house--you like it a lot but you always see opportunities to have it become a better reflection of your taste. by Joaquín Márquez Correa jmarquez.com Joaquin Márquez Correa became one of Spain's first usability experts in 1999. He is currently Director of User Experience at The Cocktail, the largest user experience agency in Spain." ["post_title"]=> string(31) "The Making of iwannagothere.com" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(221) "Joaquín Márquez Correa talks to the creators of the 2010 Webby Award-winning travel site about design, function, Ruby on Rails, and why, with website design, like packing for a trip, it's best to keep everything simple." 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In her disappointment, she opted for buying a normal travel guidebook in a bricks and mortar bookstore. However, an idea began brewing in her mind--she was probably not the only person with this need. Why not create a product to fill that void? Like all big ideas, iwannagothere.com was born in response to a need.  Maria, an interaction designer, had all the tools necessary to bring her idea to fruition. She worked at a company in Madrid, Spain, dedicated to user experience (The Cocktail) and her colleagues were immediately enthusiastic about the project. Fernando Blat, programmer, and Manuel Muñoz, designer, embarked on the adventure of creating an online product in their free time, often skipping sleep to work out their ideas. All of them were aware that there are three basic rules to follow for any online product: keep it honest, keep it easy to use, and keep your users happy by fulfilling their needs. Hence, they made the cornerstones of the project to never publish content paid from advertisers, to ensure that the site’s design would combine beauty and functionality, and to have content created by the very users of the site. Taking advantage of their experience in completing projects for others, Maria, Fernando and Manuel made the design process of iwannagothere a democratic one. All three of them came up with ideas, gave opinions, and had a hand in writing code. They had meetings on product definition, long workshops, brainstorming sessions, and many hours in the bars around the old part of Madrid, creating prototypes on napkins. It was intellectually exhausting, but extremely fun. They knew exactly what they wanted, and for the first time ever they had no limits on time and no limited budget set by a client. Recently awarded the 2010 Webby Award for best travel website (beating out even Lonely Planet), iwannagothere collects a community of passionate travelers. The project’s motto and tagline is “This is travel, not tourism.” They are neither a travel agency nor a book publisher, but a website where users create guides based on what they like and what they have discovered, and a "place" where they can share with the world their best tips based on their travel experiences. Want: If I only had 5 minutes to spend on iwannagothere, what pages would you recommend that I visit in order to get an idea of what I might find there? Maria: I would recommend that you visit the continent page for Africa, the page for Taipei, and also the page for New York, a city for which there are tons of guides out there, but on iwannagothere you’ll find unusual tips and special information that you wouldn’t find elsewhere. iwannagothere.com is a curious mix because it takes the best aspects of a social network, a shared photo gallery, and a recommendation engine. However, it does not reward the most active users, thereby avoiding the proliferation of low-value content. They have a team of editors that review content so that it is kept clean and clear, and they don’t encourage social interaction between members. In this way, they keep to the original concept of the Project and users can trust that they will find valuable information. Basically, there are three ways to access their content: by searching for a destination, by selecting one of the guides, or by looking through the most popular posts. The guides are groupings of information based on themes that may be of interest to users. This makes it easy to find a guide for touring San Francisco by bicycle, another guide for visiting the most memorable locations from the TV series Lost, or for chocolate lovers visiting London. The guides are created by users and by several collaborators that specialize in various areas. “There is no plan in place, we give people freedom in creating them,” Says Maria. Just like the rest of the website’s content, the guides are reviewed after they are published; minor grammatical errors are corrected and any advertisements found are removed. They are unequivocal: “We are very strict with this. We do not allow any advertising content, because it goes against the most important principle of the product: credibility.” The site’s design is another aspect that grabs one’s attention. It is clean and simple, free of bells and whistles with just a touch of Web 2.0 sensibility while keeping clear of the risk of falling into the trap of hyper-modernity. It is a design that facilitates the understanding of each page by creating a clear hierarchy of information. Want: What served as your inspiration in developing the look and feel of iwannagothere? Manuel: I think that initially the nicest part of iwannagothere was that since we started off with no pretensions, our original design was meant to be of practical use to us and so every two to three months we would change it. Until we arrived at what we have now. Maintaining simplicity in our design was vital for us. In fact, at first it was so simple that it looked like there was no design at all (laughs). Since then we have made improvements while always making an effort to avoid “over-designing”. The only items that are a bit more elaborate are the contest pages, where the look and feel has more of a “marketing” feel in order to encourage participation, of course. How did you choose the color palette? And why? Green is the color that started it all. A friend made our first logo and it was green. We changed it slightly, but kept the color, which we loved, as our point of reference in establishing the rest of the palette. Blue works harmoniously with the green, and varying shades of gray provide lots of help in establishing hierarchies. How did you have such a clear vision of what iwannagothere should be? Maria: The truth is that we never thought we would get to where we are now, because what we focused on was creating the travel website we would have liked to find for our own vacations – I think that has been key. In being typical users ourselves, it was easy to decide what we would like to use. iwannagothere is a website made in Spain, so why is it in English? Because the original idea was to share the content with the whole world, and English is the universal language. It wasn’t worth it to have the website only in Spanish, because when you talk about travel you must discuss it with an international scope. How long did it take to get your site’s first version online? For eight months we only worked every once in a while on weekends, until one day we decided it was time to get serious. A month and a half after that, we had our first Beta version. In April of 2009, our company became interested in the project and found a couple of international investors for us, which gave us the freedom to dedicate all of our time to the project. As a result, we were able to open the site to the public in June of 2009. How did you decide what functionality it would have? We really have a small set of functions, since what you can do on the site is very simple. Precisely what we wanted was not to have too many functions. It is a common error in product design to have an excess of functionality when what the user needs is really much less. At iwannagothere, you can create content, consume it, save it, and follow other users. Why add anything more? Why did you program the site in Ruby On Rails? What advantages has it given you? Fernando: We were clear about choosing Rails from the beginning because it’s the framework we use at work every day and we feel comfortable with it. When you are familiar with its virtues and flaws, it’s easy. The advantage it offers is precisely its flexibility, which allows us to make changes quickly and produce functionalities and mock-ups in a very short amount of time. Another advantage of Rails is that if we come up with something that we think could work, we can develop it, put it online, and try it. If it doesn’t work, we pull it down, and that’s that. It isn’t a dramatic change, because in reality the time put into developing is very short in comparison to other frameworks. The iwannagothere team knows that the key to keeping a product alive is to never stop taking care of it. You must help it grow and limit the things that the users themselves show you are of no value. In the online world, the design process is never-ending since we can never really say that a product is finished and delivered. Evolution is constant--that’s one of the lessons that Maria and her team have learned thanks to iwannagothere. They say that they are still not over the shock of having won a Webby. Even though they are currently packing their bags to head over to New York for the prize ceremony, they haven’t stopped working. On their desks, you can find papers covered in sketches and diagrams as they are continuously testing the interface. Want: How do you know what new things to add and what to remove from iwannagothere? Maria: We rely on the site’s statistics a lot by making extensive use of web analytics. If we see that something isn’t being used then we get rid of it. We also do user surveys so that they themselves can help us improve. That is, for example, how we decided to change our navigation system to make it more intuitive, and we also added forums less than a month ago. Are there items that you have discarded because they were not being used? Yes. For example, our guides had included a function that allowed users to add the dates on which they planned to travel to that destination. When we noticed that almost no one used it, we removed the option. In this way we stay true to our almost Zen design philosophy--if something is not absolutely necessary then it is extraneous, and must be removed. What can we expect from iwannagothere in the future? Is there anything new coming up soon, some new functionality, section, etc.? Our mission in the next six months is to focus on improving the product we already have. We are not including anything new because we feel that we should spend time on maintaining, cleaning, and caring for what is already on iwannagothere. We are very careful about not falling into a creative maelstrom that would lead to us neglecting our current product. However, since we tend to be restless, we are going to be releasing an iPhone application soon, and we are already thinking about an app for the iPad. But we will move forward calmly because we only want to release an application when we feel we really understand the device and what value we can contribute to it. Is there anything you don’t like on the current iwannagothere site and that you are thinking of changing or removing? Why? I think that in terms of usability there are many things that we can keep cleaning up. There is nothing I would get rid of altogether, though there is much to improve upon. In the end, it’s like your house--you like it a lot but you always see opportunities to have it become a better reflection of your taste. by Joaquín Márquez Correa jmarquez.com Joaquin Márquez Correa became one of Spain's first usability experts in 1999. He is currently Director of User Experience at The Cocktail, the largest user experience agency in Spain." 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Take a look at what surprises and delights the experts about both the usual suspects and some unexpected choices. Dan Saffer, Founder/Principal, Kicker Studio: TiVo is a perennial favorite of mine. It used to just be the box with the service; now it’s a whole website that you can work with, and I know they’re planning a more mobile presence. They care so much about the user experience. Something like TiVo, which seems so simple, actually has just a ton of complexity hidden under the hood that they’ve really simplified for you. Peter Merholz, President, Adaptive Path: TiVo still delivers the best DVR television experience. When I moved houses, I got a new Direct TV DVR--and I hate it because it’s not TiVo. Bill Scott, VP, Product Engineering, Meebo I’ve become a real fan of Twitter. it forces people to curate in a very short manner, 140 characters. I actually don’t even use Google Reader now. I just have the right people I follow. Luke Wroblewski, author, Site Seeing, Designing Web Forms I no longer go through hundreds of news articles or feeds or thousands of blog posts. I follow a couple of people that are doing that in different batches. Stuff is just coming to me as these people deem it relevant. Cordell Ratzlaff, Director of User-Centered Design, Cisco I think the Nintendo Wii is a big product. It’s a great experience. Nintendo…made a decision to focus on casual gamers rather than hard core gamers. So they went away from higher performing consoles, higher resolution graphics, and focused on fun. You don’t necessarily need all that processing power. You don’t need the high quality graphics. And you can still have fun. But I think [the Wii’s real breakthrough] is turning people’s entire bodies into an input device. You don’t necessarily realize you’ve got a controller. Doing something with your body, you’re affecting something on your video screen…with no wires in between…which is part of that magic. Dan Saffer The Wii for us is still an amazing experience. When 85-year-old grannies, 15-year-olds, my daughter who’s 9, can all play the same game--and they’re doing gestures in space, which ten years ago was something you would only see in an academic lab somewhere--that’s just thrilling. It’s really opened the door to people saying, “Wow, we can use this elsewhere.” Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group I own a Porsche and I just always delight to have an excuse to drive it. I just came back from a conference that was up in the redwoods, just north of San Francisco…it was kind of in the foothills and so there were narrow, winding roads. We deliberately came back home not on the main highway, but on a small, winding road…It’s an old car--10 years old--but it’s just so much fun. Carl Liu, Founder, Newtive Creations: A simply awesome product. It is a breakthrough innovation, not only the sleek product itself, but also the creative thinking of business model. It elevates user experience to a higher level from hardware device and software service to its online back-end resources. It engages the user deeply to its resource data, and broadly applies to other Apple products. The UX on the iPhone is amazing in that it runs the applications and keeps the internet working fluidly. Also, the operational speed and interaction response of the software far exceeds competing products. Peter Merholz: I am a die-hard iPhone user. I can’t say it’s changed my life, but it’s one of those where I don’t know if I could live without it now that it’s embedded in my life. Oddly enough, not for the phone capabilities. Mostly for the podcasting capabilities. Peter Merholz: The Southwest experience is just head and shoulders above the experience that you get on those other airlines. I end up flying a lot, and it's the only major airline that doesn’t piss me off. Bill Scott: A really neat site. It’s a great example of physicality and emotional connection. There’s a bookshelf...looks like the Apple’s iPad bookshelf. It’s got these beautiful children’s books. They’re perfectly rendered. You click one of them. It pops up, and you actually read the story to your kids or grand-kids. The pages turn beautifully. And you get to [record yourself reading it via] your webcam. You’ve got your picture in the corner, and you sit there and…record it and you give a link to it. I read one of the books to my granddaughter Cassandra up in Alaska. just the emotional connection of this. And it’s [a video of] me in the corner…and I’m reading, with all my expressions. And it’s like, “Cassandra, this is really cool. Look at the mouse there. Isn’t that mouse funny?” So it’s like you’ve read to them, and now it’s been recorded, and it’s this wonderful experience. Now she asks for it, because she wants to hear me read. Because she gets on the computer, and it’s this beautiful book. She can turn the pages. She can jump ahead, and I’m reading on that page. She can go back, and I’m reading on that page. She’s building a relationship with me, even though I’m not there. Cordell Ratzlaff: About 20 years ago, my wife and I were down in Carmel, California, one of my favorite places. And we bought this ice cream scoop. It has a nice, clean Danish design. But one of the features of the scoop is it’s got antifreeze in the handle. So your body warmth actually warms up the scoop, which makes it easier to scoop frozen ice cream out. It’s a very simple device. There’s this connection between the device and your body. There’s no moving parts in this ice cream scoop. It works on the physical level. It feels good in your hand. You can feel the scoop warming up in your hand as you hold it. It works great for scooping out ice cream. But there’s also this emotional connection to it, too. Because every time I pull that out of the drawer, I think, “That was a great trip we took down to Carmel. And pretty soon, I’m going to eat ice cream, too.” Carl Liu: A new breakthrough collaboration and communication tool. It provides real-time editing and document viewing, including text, photos, videos and maps. The issues of remote collaboration have existed for many years. We all have seen and experienced their issues, but there were no good solutions. I feel it can hugely enhance the efficiency of communication, and improve the quality of work. Peter Merholz: Google Maps started with driving directions. Then they did transit directions. Then they did walking directions. Just today, they launched bicycling directions. They just keep innovating in ways that are awesome and amazing and unparalleled on the web. Google Maps is one of those things where they anticipate what you’re going to need from it, and they deliver it before you’ve articulated that need. It’s just amazing how rapidly they release interesting new stuff. And they’ve been able to do it in a way that it doesn’t feel like feature creep or bloat. They do it in a way that really feels coherent and germane within that mapping experience. Luke Wroblewski: The things that I like have connections to my real life; they apply to things like the birth of my son. My wife and I were in the hospital with our first child, the night before she [went into] labor. We’re sitting in the hospital. There’s a period of time where not a lot is happening. So I pulled my laptop. I called up Netflix and I started streaming The Office. Here it is, two in the morning, during what could be an intense, emotional thing…and we’re watching these funny shows, instantly coming to us. That creates a personal connection to that service, because that thing was there for you in that kind of moment…this service there that helped us through that." ["post_title"]=> string(38) "Delight Box: Products the UX Pros Love" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(218) "Want Magazine 001 collected some of the leading lights in product, interface, and usability design. To each one of them, we posed this question: what products and services do YOU love to use? Here's what they told us. " ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(11) "delight-box" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2010-05-14 01:58:08" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-14 08:58:08" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(39) "http://wantmag.com/2010/05/delight-box/" ["menu_order"]=> int(11) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "1" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" } [2]=> object(stdClass)#321 (24) { ["ID"]=> int(168) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "4" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2010-05-14 00:00:23" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-14 07:00:23" ["post_content"]=> string(10919) "Carl Liu occupies a special place among product designers, due to his proficiency in a skill many suggest has fallen by the wayside: sketching. His design work on products like Compaq iPaq, the Vortex Ring Shooter, the Kensington Webcam, and the Nike Triax 300 Running Watch resulted in design awards and positions at Astro Studios, Motorola’s Advanced Concept Design Group and even the Walt Disney Company. The author of two well-reviewed, sketch-packed books, 2005’s Carl Liu Design Book and 2007’s Innovative Product Design Practice, Carl was kind enough to answer a few questions for us from his current home in Shanghai. He responded with a dozen thoughtful responses and a barrage of sketches, images, and photos of products from his product design company, Newtive. WANT MAGAZINE: What is User Experience for you? CARL: I think user experience is about when a user encounters a product, then interacts with it, and the subjective feelings that occur to the user from that very moment to everyday usage. The process goes through different stages from the open-box experience, product usage, and issue solving. In the computer age, the holistic experience might include the hardware operation, software interaction, virtual consumer services, and brand loyalty. User experience is not only conveyed by using a product but also influenced by understanding its brand value. Is it possible to design "want" (i.e. desirability) directly into a product? "Desirable" is one of the key attributes often adopted by designers while doing product design. Yes, "Want" can definitely be designed into a product. The magic is to find the WOW factor, and the short cut is to beat the norm—in other words, to be unique. The question is how much WANT can be injected directly into an object. It is difficult to measure, due to different expectations such as brand, technology, materials and user experience, from different target groups of people. Recent studies show that a good user experience has become one of the primary “wants” for both the design industry and the consumer. How much importance do you attribute to marketing and advertising towards achieving product infatuation? To achieve product infatuation, it is extremely important to send the right message to consumers through marketing campaigns and advertising. To do so, the product has to have a convincing story that expresses an emotional side of the design, in order to proactively connect to its target audiences. A holistic package includes a memorable product name, iconic trademark, meaningful brand slogan, beautiful product packaging and the great product itself. How important is product seduction for influencing impulse buying? How important is it in regards to keeping a long-term relationship with the product? Irresistible product seduction activates the WANT from impulse buyers. It oftentimes happens in a split-second to decide and make the purchase. Therefore, it is very important to always keep the products unique, fresh and interesting so they automatically attract eyeballs. In order to extend a longer life cycle for a product, one little trick designers do is to provide more color options…believe or not, quite a number of impulse buyers are willing to take out their wallet just for the right colors. Tell us about NEWTIVE. Newtive was founded in 2007 by Carl Liu. Newtive is a brand for high design house-ware products. Brand vision: Creative living. Brand mission: By closely observing people's everyday behavior at home and the workplace, we create new things and improve existing products to make the living and working environments enjoyable. Brand promise: Our products are supremely functional, ingenious and simple to use. Our goal is to make people's daily life easy and enjoyable while doing the house chores through Newtive creations. Brand values: Our dedication to this challenge leads us to rethink the everyday living and working environment and continuously create genuinely solid innovations to ensure quality living for everyone. What products have you created for Newtive so far? Newtive products are mainly in two categories. One is its own furniture line and the other is small housewares. In the past years, 90 percent of Newtive creations are made of recyclable alloy aluminum designed with product sustainability in mind. Newtive creations include side chairs, bar stools, coat stands, hangers and wall hooks. Is Newtive a full-time job for you? What else are you doing? Newtive Creations is my night shift after my two little daughters have gone to bed. I have a full-time job of running a small design studio in Shanghai. I also give talks and design workshops to universities from time to time. Newtive's mission is to design products that are, among other features, "affordable for the general public." Is "accessibility" a matter of price or design? Accessibility is a matter of both price and design. It's an art for balancing the price and design without sacrificing the accessibility and quality of a product. I believe good design adds values in many aspects, but I dislike when that design is over-manipulated with an outrageous price tag resulting in only the richest people being able to afford it. What products have you designed that are currently on the market? A coat stand and wall hooks. You have worked for small and large clients, also for your own projects. Can you elaborate on the different design processes these imply? How does each of those developments influence the nature of the final product? There is no significantly different process in terms of providing design services to small or large clients, because the basic design process is the same. The work quantity may be varied but the work quality shall always be the best that I capable of. As for designing on my own projects, I would skip a couple of stages to save time on preparing presentation materials, instead spending more time on product packaging and product advertising. You’ve told young designers that a good designer must know how to sketch, to better communicate their ideas. Can you elaborate on this? I strongly believe that sketching is the most direct, convenient and economical way to communicate a designer’s ideas. The importance of sketching is varied from different designers. Some think it is important because he or she uses this tool as part of their design process; some think it is less important because he or she relies on other communication skills to get results. There are no right or wrong answers for this, as long as designers can communicate their ideas loudly and clearly. A good sketcher is not necessary a good designer; a good designer does not have to draw beautifully as long as the drawing communicates the idea. [amazonshowcase_7d9505b33bdeae030f1f880ae286fac1]" ["post_title"]=> string(28) "Carl Liu: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(298) "In this Q & A, award-winning product designer and author Carl Liu writes about his definition of User Experience and how to design "desirability" into a product. He also talks about his company, Newtive, discusses the importance of sketching, and shares his secrets for how to extend a sales cycle." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(8) "carl-liu" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2010-05-21 18:28:56" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-22 01:28:56" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(36) "http://wantmag.com/2010/05/carl-liu/" ["menu_order"]=> int(9) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "4" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" } [3]=> object(stdClass)#320 (24) { ["ID"]=> int(169) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "4" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2010-05-14 00:00:16" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-14 07:00:16" ["post_content"]=> string(7205) "Contrary to the commonly held belief, the etymology of the word luxury, "LUV" in Greek, refers to what is loosened, separated, dislocated or out of joint—and which, moved thus, finds itself in excess; an instance of disorder and debauchery. Nothing throws luxury back to light (Lux; Greek root LEUK- or in Latin LUC-)…nothing except an imaginary construction into Western culture--especially in Europe where it is associated with the luster of that which shines. Today, luxury generates its attraction from what is “sub-lime” (past the limit) in it: what is illegitimate to portray, what the social norm excludes from representation, and therefore invites the representation of. By definition, what is beyond the range is distant, unattainable. The industry of luxury is based on the sublime, meaning the artificial creation of a distance that signifies that something is hard to attain, which therefore makes it rare, and exclusive. It is however, a paradox; luxury isn't unattainable, since it can be bought, and the desired objects can be obtained. Luxury creates the conditions for a perpetual tension between what is possible and what isn't, between what is unattainable but at the same time, procurable. The excitement of the luxury client comes from the difficulties he has to face before getting product, whether it is a question of time (waiting for a special watch to be created) or money; in luxury the possibility of the non-possible leads the desire. In the same way, luxury plays with what is hidden to all but a select few, but at the same time shown, because it must be staged, offered to view, known by all, to attain its luxurious status in the eyes of society. Because in luxury, what is desired is the desire of others, the manifestation of one's singularity, one's difference, displayed publicly. The communication campaigns of the luxury industry, where stars and celebrities are shown as icons surrounded by luxurious objects, constitute one of the best examples of this rarity, shown to the masses. The product is not alone, but presented as someone’s belonging, someone who had the chance to get something unattainable, to reduce the distance between himself and the product. Luxury invokes a form of eternal desire, of which the final goal is to defy the rules of its time, even today when the economy of exchange has become instantaneous. In luxury, the image of the past and of the future, therefore coincide; its representations turn it into a signifier of the past, idealized as something that will never be again. In the same time, this image is also a vector of Utopia, moving along the image of an unprecedented future. The representations of luxury, through and beyond the surface of appearances then sends back to a being of uber- or meta humanity, to stories and characters, to affects and sensibilities that impose the idea that, to paraphrase the famous TV series, luxury "comes from the beyond." Inspired by luxury, the past itself becomes alien, as is exemplified by the museographic representation of luxury, shown vacuum-sealed, independently of the superannuated poetry of the materials, and the reality of the social customs, without any anthropological, or ethnographic, or even political, concern that would risk giving the objects an historical dimension. The ultimate goal in creation and product design in luxury, whether it is for a bag, a jewel or even for clothes, is to reach eternity, to defy time and fashion by creating something that just look beautiful, from everybody’s point of view. While “luxury” is relative and varies according to different people—to some, it's a Cartier ring, to others, a few leisurely hours wrestled from a day of intense work—the nature of the desire for luxury is universal: Luxury creates, above all, a break from normality, from dailyness, from what Mircea Eliade called “The Profane,” as opposed to the sacred. Through their desire for luxury, consumers manifest their need to experience new, rare and different situations—extra-ordinary ones. The luxury industry creates the desire by sacralizing the objects and therefore by making the consumer believe that they will transform their existential life through that desired object. Living in luxury, wearing a very special watch, a unique bag, a designer dress, is placing oneself in the realm of a rare and exceptional kind of life. In our civilization, the luxury industry, and the culture of luxury, are closely linked to possession and therefore to the object, to the product. Yet we now live in the era of information where the Internet, particularly, has become one of the principal media of communication. The Internet, and more generally the information industry, only produce immaterial goods, goods which move further and further away from the traditional principles of the economic value, while their symbolic power only increases. They are the ones that today, require the consumer's desire, because they are synonymous with socialization, recognition, but also knowledge, control and power. The immaterial goods transform the notion of possession, since one’s access is obtained through a mode of appropriation without ownership. This lateral translation of the object of desire (which to simplify this idea, moves from the realm of reality to the immaterial), is a significant issue for the luxury industry, which has built desire and its myth on material goods. Jeremy Rifkin calls this the “Age of Access,” and suggests that it modifies the space and time of perception, creating a "here" that is "nowhere" and a real-time in which we travel without having to move. The paradigm of Access also influences the relationship between perception and knowledge of the other. We know each other without seeing or hearing each other. In other words, we are developing new modes of representing reality and, as a consequence, new imaginary worlds where concepts of presence, sensuality, embodiment are excluded. The affects and the emotional links to these modes of representation are still unknown, but one could bet they are evolving as well. Thus, the conditions of identification of what we calls 'luxury" become now uncertain. The perceptual tools that allow us to perceive something as "luxurious" are on the verge of being replaced by sensitivity as defined by technology, for which the nature of desire will most likely be different. by Lionel Ochs methos.fr Lionel Ochs is a cultural anthropologist and filmmaker based in Paris. He has been working on various subjects and doing fieldwork in different regions of the world. For a few years now, he has been asked by the luxury goods industry to investigate the topic of luxury through research and documentary films." ["post_title"]=> string(37) "Luxury and the Construction of Desire" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(223) "Cultural Anthropologist and Luxury industry Consultant Lionel Ochs of Methos breaks down the origins of Luxury and examines what happens to it in a technological "Age of Access." Can we apply luxury values to digital goods?" 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