At a facilitation session for an international banking group, one of the executives spotted my package of colored markers, and said to me, “Oh, coloring! My kids love to color—are we going to do that?” I answered quickly, “We certainly are! And I won’t even ask you to stay in the lines.”

In truth, I thought he was trying to make light of the huge sheets of paper on the walls with instructions and simple images. He might have been intimidated, faced with the task the group was assigned to do. The meeting was to be about managing reorganization, exposing roadblocks and finding missing connections between staff and departments. It didn’t seem to look like a pleasant prospect, and many in the room were apprehensive about spending two days exposing their problems.

But intimidation was not my goal. As a visual facilitator, my job was to give these leaders some tools beyond their words to expose missing connections in a way that they could see where the ball gets dropped and to put their individual processes in front of the entire group. Finding common ground by making visual sense out of a situation is, so often, the starting place for streamlining bottlenecks and achieving consensus.

Graphic Facilitation using Mind Mapping

Asking “how” and “why” frequently gave me the ability to draw individual processes, using lines, arrows, and symbols, or sum up attitudes and reactions with visual metaphors. Here’s a mind map I drew quickly that summarized common obstacles in getting approvals to move from department to department. (Please note that the grainy picture quality comes from the client’s permission only to use a low-res version of the image).

Did I ask them to draw anything? Not specifically—there was enough for them to think about without asking them to test those skills. But what did happen was the use of more visual metaphors as they spoke, more clarity as I would draw a visual description and ask, “does it look like this?…does this lead to that?”, and more comfort as each participant felt they could get their individual point expressed and heard more distinctly.

At the lunch break at the beginning of the first day, I asked that same executive if what he now saw on the walls was useful…and why. His answer?

“You surprised me, when I first saw the coloring stuff. But, actually, it’s very useful, I can see everything we spoke about so far right in front of me, and it’s not only helping me remember, but it’s making me think about new ideas.”

I just responded visually, nodding my head and smiling from ear to ear.

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Bill Clinton at the World Business Forum

Bill Clinton put it in a framework. Jack Welch said  it was embodied as “cool” by the late Steve Jobs. The CEOs of Burberry (Angela Ahrendts) and of Cirque du Soleil (Daniel Lamarre) described how they pay teams to do it. These leaders called it DREAMING, but based on the descriptions I heard at the World Business Forum last week, I don’t think they meant the random thoughts and pictures that float through our minds at night or daydreaming during a particularly boring presentation.

The longer definition I would use is creating a vision, rather than having a vision or being visionary, as both of these cases imply some kind of passive or innate ability.  All the dreams (or visions) mentioned described scenes, products or results which could be depicted in a photo or picture without the need for words. Think of the reactions of happy customers, satisfied employees, and excitement generated by new discoveries or products that generate good feelings. Increased percentages of market share, dollars or numbers of customers are important, but were defined as natural outcomes from seeing dreams realized. The vision must come first.

In presenting their messages, the most effective speakers (whether using slides or not) tended to create pictures with their words, using great storytelling and powerful metaphors to deliver their messages.

Malcolm Gladwell connected dreaming to risk taking. Takashi Hatchijo, Chairman of the Board of Hitachi, said, “We need to rededicate ourselves to inspire the world.”

Ben Zander at the World Business Forum

Ben Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and co-author of The Art of Possibility used not only music but visual clues as well, such as drawing outside of perceived boundaries on a flipchart, and asking us to “look for the shining eyes!” to inspire us to think about possibilities.

It was an event rich with vision, providing great material to create the graphic recordings you can see in full  here.

Bill Clinton summarized his message by saying, “we need to get into the future business.” To do that, facilitating visions of things to come starts with dreaming.

Photo of Bill Clinton by Dov Friedmann — PhotographyByDov.com

Graphic Recording of the World Business Forum

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Image via Wikipedia

I am watching, as many others apparently are, to see how the LinkedIn IPO will fare this week. This is the first of the Social Media platform giants to hit the stock exchange, now to be offered on the NYSE, rather than on NASDAQ, as originally proposed.

I’m not only interested in the value of shares (Mashable has been covering this intently), but the whole question of whether social media will now have a new kind of legitimacy for the typical business leader, particularly over 35 or even 45 years old. This has happened at least twice before in the past 30 years: specifically, when Apple (back then “Apple Computer”) released their Apple II desktop computer with a spreadsheet application (Visicalc), the desktop computer for business use was made legitimate by IBM’s PC (crushing the field with Lotus 1-2-3 sitting on Microsoft’s plain-Jane operating system). The World Wide Web became legitimate for business first in the early 90′s with the Netscape browser, again to be superseded by Microsoft with Internet Explorer.

Colleagues and I joke about the “facebookification” of LinkedIn, or the Twitterizing of LinkedIn, but I would say there are two ‘killer apps’ hidden in the bowels of the LinkedIn world:

1. Job Listings/Resumes
2. Group discussions (with moderation)

These are not new application—Monster.com was a leader for a long time in the job hunter’s world. Craig’s list, the de facto Web classifieds (at least for the US) has been around for a while. But the combination of the online resume right up front in the business/working ethos of LinkedIn makes it easier to manage than both of these older stalwarts.

However, I have really taken to the Groups and discussions, even though I am trying to give Quora a fair shake. What’s the difference? In my case, ease of use. LinkedIn is just easier to follow the Groups, topics and discusssions I want to follow. It’s easier to make a connection when I want to connect privately with someone about something under discussion. I trust the moderation, and even with Quora’s voting system, I still find the jumble of questions and answers harder to sort through.

And let me be bluntly clear about the interface: it does the job adequately and quite directly. As my fellow UX friends will say, that’s smart and that’s good, because as Google has clearly taught us, fancy graphics and an intrusive interface that slows down GETTING IN AND GETTING OUT will not improve the user experience. And what does the average business user want?

They want something that’s tested and works. They want it easy to use and relatively painless. They want it to be unobtrusive. They want privacy a la carte. And they want something that’s proven to be profitable as a business, to insure that it will last—this already happened, as opposed to some of the other (major) social media entities.

Visually, the unprettified LinkedIn may be low on pictures, but it puts connectivity right up front and center, with personal/professional background info and group interactivity just a layer or two below. Not glamorous, but it does the job. And, unlike Facebook, there are no great controversies over privacy issues and the ownership of content.

So, Thursday, I’m watching the New York Stock Exchange to see how it goes…and I might have to disclose that I own shares in LinkedIn by Friday, if the path to legitimacy for social media roars open.

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If success in Social Media is to be understood as ubiquitous, simple and easy, here’s an example of a great use of a commonly available tool that can work for business requiring no special app or interface design.

In a recent trip to Mexico City I was advised to not hire a taxi by walking out into the street and just raising my hand to flag one down, as I would in New York City. There was signage at the hotel warning visitors to only get cabs from their taxi stand, as well as local business people who gave me warning beforehand, so I was prepared to either make a phone call to get a recommended car service or wait patiently at the hotel’s manned curbside entrance.

On day 1 of the my trip in order to get from the hotel to the conference site, I dutifully went out to the hotel’s cab stand. A cab pulled up, operated by a driver who spoke adequate English, enough for my traveling partners’ comfort. He drove us as efficiently as possible through the tangled traffic (including using side streets to get past massive major roadway reconstruction that reminded me of Boston’s “BIG DIG” project), and handed us his business card as he dropped us off at our destination. “Call me anytime, day or night, if you need a taxi,” he said. Great! We had safe transportation, at a reasonable price.

At the end of the day, I called him to get a ride back to the hotel. He asked if I would mind if his son would come to pick us up. I thought, “why not?”, and a young man, probably in his mid-20′s, driving a different car (with the company logo discretely painted in the front window) arrived 20 minutes later.

In the course of the trip back (again through all of the short cuts that an experienced driver would take to avoid construction and traffic), I discover that this son was part of a family-owned fleet of six taxis, a combination of brothers and cousins and their sons all pooling their vehicles and sharing fares. At the end of this trip, Mauricio then gave us his business card, branded with the fleet’s logo and giving his name and his cell phone number (see below—but read the tips first!).

My business partners and I then called him regularly over the next two days for our travel, but the most interesting element of my experience with this cab driver and his use of mobile technology occurred on the last night of our stay, where we all had early flights back to New York.

Mine was the first, where I asked to be picked up at 2AM. “No problem,” says Mauricio, the taxi driver.

Here comes the social media surprise:

At 2:05 AM, I am patiently waiting at the cab stand driveway. No sign of Mauricio’s small grey car. At 2:14 AM, my phone rings. It’s Mauricio texting me, reporting that he is waiting for me—however, he’s on the opposite side of the building, at the rear entrance of the hotel.

Not a problem: a few more short text messages, and he has pulled around the building. Off we go.

I’m amazed…I can’t imagine having the same experience with a New York cabbie. Perhaps I could with one of the “gypsy” cabs (the private fleets that tend to service the areas of New York City that our expensively-licensed yellow cabs don’t want to drive through), but this fellows nonchalant use of texting to conduct business offered an important view of where customer service needs to be: EVERYWHERE. All he needed was my phone number.

Social Media doesn’t have to be hard. It just has to be organic in the way you communicate with customers.

The 5 tips:

1. Keep it simple.
2. Make it easy to be accessible.
3. Boil it down to getting the message across (both ways).
4. When it’s over, don’t linger (customers have other things to do).
5. Satisfied customers come back when they are ready—and they tell their friends.

With that last point in mind, if you’re in Mexico City and you need a reliable cab driver, call Mauricio Escobedo:

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Transmedia has gone beyond simply infiltrating the social media channels: last year I participated in a transmedia storytelling property called “Crushing it! A Social Media Love Story” which used Twitter, YouTube and a collection of blogs to create a story and engage an audience over the course of one week. Getting audience participation in creating the flow and defining the outcome of the story was an important element in the activity. I would say that if we had a pre-constructed plot line or a fixed, predetermined ending it really wouldn’t be correct to call it “transmedia”. Adaptation, surprise and collaborative genesis to both characters and story threads are now considered integral to a transmedia property. The key to success was how the writing team worked on the project: they “performed” as actors, primarily in real time via Twitter, writing in the voice of their characters. They could respond naturally and convincingly when interacting with people on-line, and then follow up with scripted material played in front of the camera on YouTube which reflected conversation that occurred earlier in the day. What happens when an automated content generator, which we usually call a bot or spammer, is unleashed to engage us via Twitter or Facebook?

In the past month I have noticed a sudden wave of new spammers, bots and other blatantly unrealistic Twitterers following me. For example, take a look at the profile of someone who tried to follow me in the past few weeks (This account has already been closed by Twitter, by the way).

Screen shot of a spammer's Twitter account

What are the giveaway signs? The name and the “glam shot” profile picture are a good place to start—sort of like those photos that go into picture frames that are sold in a store, but you wouldn’t put them up in your home because they aren’t really you. The bio is also rather suspicious.

The tweets are a collection of gibberish or odd listing of websites. In this case, the creation of a fake account is pretty easy to spot. But what about a more carefully planned creation of a false identity, or persona?

Social Times reported last month that the U.S. Air Force was looking for the development of  ‘“Persona Management Software,” software that manages online “personas,” allowing a single human to assume the identities of as many fake people as they’d like.’

A month later, as I check back on the article (which has not been pulled offline), I notice it has received eight comments. I have no idea how many views the article has had, but I would have thought it would have gained more attention. In the meantime, I assume that the best “fake” personas would be created and maintained by creative individuals working in real time, building their characters and weaving their stories as they do in ARG’s, World of Warcraft, Second Life and other places where the completely fabricated persona is the norm, but created through the regular interaction of a real person. Persona Management Software will have to be written to appear to care about the people it is engaging with in conversation, and will have to display concern, interest, and the ability to draw from both knowledge and experience to seem real.

There are at least 4 valuable lessons to learn from these automated content generators that apply to social media, transmedia, and storytelling as it applies to brand management or customer relationship management:

• Interaction in text-based social media is perceived as “real” when the content seems conversational, with a natural give-and-take. One-way or scripted messaging isn’t satisfying. Although you should answer questions or acknowledge requests for contact, social media is asynchronous communication and you can afford to take time to make your words relate and make sense.

• Personality, much like the defining qualities of a brand, is perceived through  expositional content or information over time — one tweet, one tag line, or a 2-line bio on a twitter page is, a best, an ice-breaker. The collected information others receive from us gives the audience a larger picture, and establishes credibility. Bots, spam engines and some over-eager marketers never exhibit patience — they routinely “overshare”, and often don’t create a satisfactory “back story” about who is the person behind the message.

• Asking questions does draw people in, but a response that reflects comprehension keeps people engaged.  Automated voice response systems have become much better at this, but when it gets too complex they are still triggered to bring in the live person to get full satisfaction. Spammers lose our attention if they cannot answer questions—that’s why they pepper their text-based messages with phone numbers to reach a live respondent to attempt to sell us a story.

• Offering to help before knowing what the message recipient wants or needs is a dead giveaway that you’re probably not real—or rude, at the very least. Telephone solicitation scripts in recent years have moved to the “may I ask you to participate in a survey” model to find out if the subject fits the sales target before making the offer. By signing on for social media interaction through Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn we may have given away a large chunk of our privacy, but it doesn’t mean we will accept intrusive behavior. Asking someone to visit a link in an introductory message is often considered suspicious.

This might seem like common sense more than secrets to social media or transmedia success, but how to handle consumer interaction is a thorny question for customer relation professionals  and marketers who are looking at the growing use of Facebook and Twitter by consumers and potential consumers. Even the casual social media user  is not a passive audience member; he/she is substituting Facebook messages, tweets, blog comments and YouTube posts in place of or in addition to phone calls and emails, and the conversation is often both revealing and quite public. Automation, despite winning at ‘Jeopardy!’, isn’t ready to take the place of human interaction. At least, not until spammers really learn how to program the algorithm(s) of natural conversation in satisfying sync with real life.

Spammers and unaware business enterprises attempting to utilize social media appear to be as artificial as the actors in silent movies overtly gesturing and posturing to convey their message. It takes hands-on participation and conscious interaction to make social media or transmedia to work—even if it’s use is to fulfill a role.

Twitter Spambots - Austin Powers would have them as a new nemesis' minions.

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Facebook once again has made a unilateral decision to completely reorganize your pages. Besides the visual changes, behind the scenes FBML (Facebook Markup Language) has been dropped officially on tabs for iFrames. Whether or not you chose preview and [sic] UPGRADE your page, it will change on March 10, 2011. What does this mean for web developers and marketers attempting to build advertising campaigns, marketing programs or customer-sensitive communities?

Forget FBML, it's iFrames all the time now!

In the immediate scheme of things, it means more income for those on the cutting edge of Facebook design, marketing and prognostication: at least for those who have clients with deep pockets and low pain thresholds. For others it means either another scramble to keep up, or sad resignation of submitting to Facebook’s ever-changing platform based on the whims of Facebook’s internal teams of developers.

I expect to see another bump in the road for those once eager to add a Facebook page to their marketing strategy, as they will have to completely rethink how to build and manage a Facebook page. My friends in metrics and analytics are, I am sure, both excited and daunted by Facebook once more.

Facebook has adopted the “let’s launch it and see if our users like it…if they don’t, we’ll roll it back” style of agile development. They are not the only ones who do that: Google, Amazon and Ebay have been doing this for years in exactly the same way, and they are all very large sites with millions of users world-wide. But why does Facebook’s frequent changes, both large and small, seem to cause so much attention?

The promise of Social Media vs the premise

Google is an advertising platform, even though the search engine is the major gateway point. The advertising service comes up first in search results and their free Gmail platform. Amazon, even though their reader reviews are a core part of their engine sells products, and Ebay’s community-based, trusted auction system is also primarily a sales platform, where the community functionality has a very tight perimeter of actions and responses. None of these call themselves social media platforms, though they all have elements of open communication, community building and profile registration and access.

Facebook proposed a different contract with the user at its outset, and this feeds the fuel of discontent. The original proposal seemed pretty altruistic: Facebook was a place to find friends, maintain connections, share with family. It was as social as can be,  and all for free. The seeds of ugly arose when privacy appeared to give way to profit. The biggest blowup came about a year ago with a major change in the Terms of Service, exposing private data from users not just to each other, but to marketers. Facebook users complained bitterly enough that Facebook finally asked the users to vote on new terms of service, and haphazardly made privacy more controllable by the individual user. But who made that privacy a given? And how long can free be really free?
Junk mail, 30-second spots and spam
>Postal systems around the world subsidize their income through the heavy discounting of bulk mail. This allows advertisers to send unsolicited material directly to your physical home, daily. There is a fragile contract of privacy, as neighborhoods are targeted by socio-economic factors. Both radio and television have had advertising to subsidize free and even paid broadcasting. Direct mail gave way to email solicitation, at best for offers and news based on subscription, at worst, spam. The only apparently private transmissions are phone calls, but that doesn’t follow the free model and so we keep our single phone conversations uninterrupted…however, we are permitted to receive unsolicited sales calls. All of these systems became large enough that governments stepped in to create and enforce controls and protections, and it is rare for massive, system-level changes to happen. And as broadcasting is more one-way than either two-way or linked through expansive peer-to-peer networking, it is expected to work in a more anonymous environment than a social network.

But the Facebook contract with its users is fragile, as the governance is difficult to enforce when Facebook uses a “my house, my rules” policy. As Facebook continues to expand its services and open its data to marketers, it will continuously ask for more access to content and data from its users, and orient its platform to suit the needs of the paying clientele. As a result, the user will give up both on-screen real estate and concessions of privacy in order to keep a free platform.

If it can stay agile enough to keep the users posting, playing games and clicking on advertising in perpetuity remains to be seen. It may go the way of MySpace, to be supplanted by another platform, or may settle into middle age with less rapid alterations in appearance and function, as it gets larger and has to support a wider user base which can only take so many rapid changes before giving up and finding a simpler, more stable environment.

In the meantime, if you intend on using Facebook Pages as part of your branding, marketing, customer outreach, and you intend on investing in Social Media, you must stay flexible. You must be ready to adapt as quickly as every six months, you must expect to learn and re-learn both the technology as well as the strategy as we lose FBML (Facebook Markup Language) to iFrames with HTML and Javascript.

Your best defense is to both maintain your own web presence (starting with your own domain, and continuing with having your site built to your needs) and keeping social media platforms within the mix.

Is the sudden change and loss of FBML frustrating? Probably so. Engaging? In an ironic twist of the use of that word in Social Media, endlessly!

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The new web interface for Twitter has been sitting as “beta” for a few months now (as of this writing), and I’m quite sure my visual branding has suffered. If you think that’s not important, and that it’s only the 140 characters that count, please think again. If you have added a pictures with your head shot, or a company logo, or any kind of image to replace the anonymous silhouette, you have branded yourself visually. And that matters.

Here’s a screenshot of my old Twitter page:

Screenshot for @deanmeistr's account under the old Twitter design - 1024 x 768 pixels wide

Although the background was a static image, with no ability to link (either with text or to use mapping), one still could create the illusion of a standard web site with navigation in a left hand column. Twitter’s live content would float in the browser window, with a wide center column of tweets and some navigational features in the right.

What’s happening, indeed!

All of my branding is sucessfully blotted out with the new design, which absorbs so much of the browser’s live area you see something rather distracting rather than my carefully laid out background.

Here’s my page showing the new Twitter design, again at 1024 x 768 pixels. Notice my entire identity work is almost completely lost, as Twitter fills the central content with additional information. Note also that I have no ability to control the CSS they provide; that floating content is set in both in its width and placement, and I cannot put any background image underneath it to compensate for the space they have consumed.

And to be fair, I have tried this in all of the standard browsers, from IE to Safari to Firefox, on both major platforms (Windows and Mac).

Twitter's revised design in the browser for @deanmeistr's account - still at 1024 x 768 pixels wide.

Here’s my friend Tom Guarriello’s (@tomguarriello) Twitter page, in the “new” twitter. Looks fine? You can see his personal information that he put together in the left, again as a “mini branding” area. But look again. This is a screen shot taken with the browser opened up to over 1400 pixels wide, in order to compensate for the contents’ floating requirement center screen. This is not standard to most browsers running on the average desktop monitor.

@tomguarriello's Twitter page - at 1430 x 763 pixels!

Even the iPad and notebook user running Twitter from their browser would more likely see this:

@tomguarreillo on Twitter - at 1024 x 768 pixels

Visual Branding on Twitter? Limited Possibilities.

Twitter’s message on their ABOUT page states:

“Businesses use Twitter to quickly share information with people interested in their products and services, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and influential people. From brand lift [sic], to CRM, to direct sales, Twitter offers businesses a chance to reach an engaged audience.”

Brand lift? I like brand lift. However, I consider visual identity an important part of creating and owning a brand. I want every opportunity possible to identify my brand, and the background on the twitter page was just about the only area permitted. Essentially, visual branding has been deprecated to a single, smaller square image (often not bigger than a favicon, when seen on a mobile device). It’s really too bad that Twitter decided to remove the ability to enrich the visual branding experience by covering the background area (for most browsers), and not offering anywhere else in the foreground to uniquely identify the account holder.

Recently, Facebook changed their default landing page for people to view more pictures of the account holder in a more prominent place, right above the main content stream area. For branding, visuals matter, which is why we spend so much time and money creating visual branding identities. Will Twitter make a revision to the design of their browser page to allow for more visual branding opportunities if it offers them greater financial gain? I hope so. I’m ready for that.

In the meantime, I’ll think about how to squeeze my branding visual into a long, narrow channel about 50 pixels wide, and hope Twitter doesn’t remove that possibility completely in their next revision of the browser page.

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Storytelling can counteract hidden influencers

This is a snarky view of the truth about who really influences clients about their decision-making process. In particular, I often hear from clients of smaller businesses new to the web, “My son took a look at the site and said…,” or “Let me see what so-and-so thinks” about the navigation of a site. the mid-sized and enterprise client version is “the marketing department says”, or “the IT department thinks”. This is not to say that every client is unsophisticated, or mistrustful. Some of them hide their doubts by saying, “let me review this”, while they run to Google the terms “wireframe,” “user experience” and “below the fold.” New terminology, and an unknown way of doing business is, naturally, frightening to any normally-confident professional.

There are the clients who are ready to pull the trigger and have the site launch, until someone has asked them about adding more text, another button, another navigation tab. Who is this someone? Perhaps it’s a colleague, a long-term professional friend who knows their business. Or the consultant who is advising them on another aspect of their business, who’s looking at the site with fresh eyes, but has no knowledge of the goals set in the brief about the purpose and desired outcomes for the site.

That’s when it’s time to pull out the notes, the wireframes, the sketches, the sitemap, the doodles and brainstorming images you created with the client. Review the personas you have created as the target audience, play “squint at the screen” to show the client how much is really visible and what matters when a new user lands on the site.

Tell your client’s story to improve your influence

Give your client every opportunity to air their fears that the site won’t do well, or seems different than what they imagined it would look like. Learn and understand their story, as they become the owner and publisher of a web site, a mobile app, or a participant in a social network. Create the story of a successful experience for a new user coming to their site, and another story of an experience user returning to their site. Show them why that person would send the link to your client’s URL to a friend.

Be prepared and know the story of your client’s site. Your confidence that you’ve done your work properly and professionally, that you’ve covered all of the goals, whether coming from the perspective of branding, marketing, or sales, should be the strongest influencer on your client. If it’s not, review, refresh, and reboot.

Mindmap created using iThoughtHD on the iPad. To grab a copy of the Mindmap click on the image below:

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Note created with Penultimate iPad ap and a stylus

Perhaps I have fat fingertips. I haven’t measured them, but as deftly as I can wield an xacto knife  or carve a turkey, I have better control when using an opposable thumb. After loading Sketchbook on my iPhone and a handful of other sketching programs, I found that none of them were both fun and truly functional for my work, with its small screen and my fleshy fingertips. I gave up on the idea of writing and drawing with my bare finger on a touchscreen device. In comparison, I have a Wacom tablet for my MacBook Pro and I’ve put in the time to learn how to work with it. The Wacom features a pressure-sensitive surface and a pen-like tipped stylus. On the iPhone and, I feared, on the iPad, it would be back to coarse finger painting, at best.

I gave in and purchased an iPad after seeing a few new styluses appearing on the market, along with some videos showing them in action.

After a few weeks of testing three different capacitive styluses, I have settled into using one of the most frequently, a second as backup, and a third that went into the trash.

From weakest to strongest, here are my results after 2 weeks of testing and play:

THIRD PLACE— Into the Trash Bin

Sorry, Ten One Design, I think you were the first, and it was a valiant effort, but the pogo stylus can’t keep up with my pushy hands and desire for fast, precise movement.

I bought the pogo stylus originally for the iPhone. I also must admit that I have arthritis in both of my thumbs, which makes gripping thin implements and tools (or brushes) rather painful after a while. Therefore, the pogo’s thin dimensions makes it handy for the pocket but hard to use over long periods of time (for me).

The greater problem is the actual capacitive surface the pogo provides. It looks somewhat like a bulbous Q-tip end, and I discovered rather quickly that the tip would float around the screen from pressure. My strokes could slip and slide, and I really was afraid to overuse the stylus. Sure enough, over time, it became less and less accurate as the tip end wobbled around.

Summary: OK for first out of the gate; not really a useful tool over time, particularly for fine work on the screen, such as writing or drawing.

SECOND PLACE: “Curiously Refreshing”

Dagi Stylus tested in the Notes+ app on the iPad

The Dagi appeared shortly after the iPad came out, and promised terrific accuracy based on the hard, clear capacitive surface with a red dot to indicated where the precision point would be. Sounded good, and I liked the video on their website. I bought it via ebay, and waited about 10 days for delivery from China.

The Dagi isn’t kidding around: its thicker, pen-like body feels more like a pen. The odd, circular flat clear end of the pen has a small red dot to allow you to see the surface of the screen. Good idea. Handling of the stylus, however, does seem to need a little bit of managing to keep the flat surface of the stylus end in constant contact with the screen surface. Not so good. Add to that the difficulty of not being able to rest your palm on the surface of the iPad (it cannot distinguish between the flat end of your hand and a finger), and it’s even more difficult to keep it evenly touching. Circular strokes are quite hard to keep smooth. Finally, that red dot isn’t nearly as accurate as one might hope, especially with the lag between contact and what appears on the screen.

Summary: Almost there. I’ll keep using it and see if I become more proficient with it. You might like the Dagi, but I think the balancing act between writing without being able to rest your hand as you write/draw/doodle and keeping the pen flat will slow you down—annoyingly so. With the screen tilted, it’s not much better.

I also was afraid of breaking off the end of the stylus, even though it seems to be pretty well secured. I can’t be trusted when I clip a pen inside my shirt pocket. Yes, I still do that.

Testing the Boxwave stylus in the AirSketch app on the iPad

FIRST CHOICE: (for the moment) is the Box Wave stylus. Like the Dagi, it has a pen-weight, pen-sized body. The tip, however, is firm. Do not expect it to look like a wacom stylus: it has a thick tip end, fatter than a big Sharpee but smaller than my pinkie finger. The large drawing on the top of this post was done with it in Sketchbook Pro in about 2 minutes, with just a few undo’s to clean up the few times I inadvertently let the edge of my palm hit touch the screen. The sketch seen to the left was done in the AirSketch app, with my iPad set up to stand at an angle.

Summary: My vote for now goes to the BoxWave Capacitive iPad Stylus (the link takes you to purchase the stylus from Amazon). Although this still doesn’t work as well as the Wacom tablet/Art Rage Studio Pro arrangement I’ve become accustomed to when I’m not using analog pen/pencil/marker and paper, I’m willing to keep working on getting used to it for graphic recording when I want to carry less equipment and avoid scanning and retouching images later.

I would offer a link to the Dagi Stylus, but I could only find it and purchase it directly from them via ebay.

To be completely fair, here is a link to purchase the Ten One Design Pogo Sketch Stylus, also via Amazon. I hope they keep working on it.

I’ll probably have an update on this post in a few weeks, as well as more to say about sketching and notetaking apps for the iPad as I take it out more regularly into the field.

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Design with context and memory. Present with context and memory. Develop with context and memory.

In a recent blog post by Shiv Singh about the New York Times‘ iPhone app, he is disappointed by certain aspects of functionality he feels was left out. He wonders why location-awareness for locally relevant news isn’t built in. He is unhappy that he can’t make and read comments on articles. He wants to know what articles others in his social circle are reading. In short, he wants the analog, pre-digital experience of the Times available on the iPhone application, but he doesn’t say it that way. Perhaps he doesn’t remember the experience of reading the New York Times before there was a digital environment, so let me talk about “the way it used to be”.

Image by JcOlivera.com via Flickr

A morning subway ride to work with the broadsheet version of the New York Times might begin with a paper carefully folded to display an article that fit into a few columns; easy enough to read and hold while standing and holding onto a strap in a crowded subway car. Reading time: about 3-5 minutes per article, written with major information in the first paragraph, and more and more detail added as you read down through the story. If you didn’t finish it, at least you had the core content.

Sometimes I’d find an article I really thought a friend should read. So, I had two ways of getting that message across, first by asking, “Did you read the article about _____________ in the Times’ today?”. Or, if I really felt strongly about it, and wanted to make sure my friend knew all of the details, I’d rip it out of the paper, or clip it, and give it to them.

Next step: the crossword puzzle. My first introduction to crossword puzzles was on Sunday’s, when childhood weekend visits with my grandparents included an overwhelming hour or so working the New York Times’ fiendish Sunday crossword with my grandfather—never to completion. Later there was a period when a group of four of us at work would spend lunch hour solving the weekday NY Times’ crossword together.

Image by Listen Missy! from Flickr

I never wrote a letter to the Times, but I have to other newspapers, including a rather lengthy one to the San Juan Star which prompted an feature article about three months later. But letter writing was a venue for interaction that could potentially be shared with the entire reading audience, even though the bottleneck was much tighter to get through when print and paper costs (not to mention the manditory editorial curation) kept “Letters to the Editor” short and strictly controlled.

The Times’ Metro section could be tunneled down into if I wanted to know what tidbits were happening in my Borough of choice. I grew up in Queens, but Manhattan, my current home, was far more alluring. The Metro section fueled the imagination of goings on in the glamorous neighborhoods, the “real” New York.

It was all there. The things Shiv want’s aren’t new. So, I agree with him: if the New York Times will review the history of the user experience of their paper, they will find plenty of features to add to an iPhone app, an iPad app, a Kindle app, an anykind of portable digital version that will come down the pike.

People tend to want the same things over and over. It’s not a bad thing, it comes from certain patterns, desires and needs that come from the human experience. As designers, developers, storytellers, we just need to uncover that common story, that familiar experience, and figure out how to recreate it with new tools. Put a successful experience into place, regardless of the tool, and you will have an engaged audience.

And to that point, Shiv, I too, would pay for a subscription to the New York Times if they would give me those capabilities as well. And I might even read some of the ads too.

Post image: Subway, 1934, oil on canvas by Lily Furedi; from Flikr collection of cliff1066™

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