Deriving Design From Content at MOO

“They could be updated, moved around . . . you could pull out a specific card and stick it on your monitor. The brand guidelines were very much meant to be used—and they were meant for the whole company.” 1 That’s how Denise Wilton, the former creative director of MOO and moo.com, described the editorial and visual brand guidelines she developed for MOO, the charismatic custom printing company based in the UK.

Is there a place for high-quality paper stock and inexpensive, extremely small print runs in the $100 billion global print industry? As the custom printing industry has commoditized low cost, low-volume solutions—100 business cards for less than $50? No problem!—MOO stands out for its cheeky, can-do value proposition. How? While its products offer value with fairly quick turnaround, they’re often not the cheapest or fastest solution for the target audience, many of whom are freelancers who demand quick turnaround. Instead, MOO maintains its brand through peerless consistency and builds an enthusiastic following by ensuring the brand comes through in every touchpoint and interaction:

■ Category nomenclature
■ Gallery of audience submissions
■ Calls to action
■ Error messages, 404 -page design, and metacontent
■ Confirmation emails
■ Product packaging design, inserts, and promo codes
■ Tweets from @overheardatMOO

Spanning verbal and visual style and tone, those are just a sample of MOO’s touchpoints.

Call it loyalty, call it love, but many of MOO’s customers greet even the most mundane interactions, like confirmation emails, with glee, forwarding them to friends and tweeting out quotes. Naturally, this free advertising only further bolsters the brand and company. Printing millions of cards every month and shipping to customers in more than 180 countries, MOO soon noticed more than half its customers lived across the pond. MOO responded by opening a US production facility in 2009 to meet the volume of orders coming from the US. The headquarters remain in London, and the voice remains distinctly British.

Brand loyalists are “in” on maintaining the magic of MOO. What’s the secret? They engage with a brand that never breaks character—ever. This all comes down to how the content and visual design (along with interaction affordances and features) all work together to maintain a cohesive voice and consistently manifest the same communication goals, or message architecture.

A message architecture is a hierarchy of communication goals; as a hierarchy, they’re attributes that appear in order of priority, typically in an outline. I usually focus on establishing three to five main communication goals, or big buckets of terms, and define them in as much detail as is necessary for the team that will use the document. In this chapter, we’ll discuss how visual designers and content strategists (and, later, copywriters) can apply a message architecture to develop a cohesive, consistent user experience.

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Introduction to the Tcl Language

The next five chapters constitute a Tcl language tutorial. This chapter provides an overview of the Tcl syntax, data structures, and enough commands to develop applications. Chapter 4 discusses Tcl I/O support for files, pipes, and sockets. Chapters 5–8 introduce more commands and techniques and provide examples showing how Tcl data constructs can be used to create complex data constructs such as structures and trees. Chapters 9 and 10 introduce the TclOO object-oriented support package and explain some tricks in using dynamic and introspective object-oriented programming effectively.

This introduction to the Tcl language will give you an overview of how to use Tcl, rather than be a complete listing of all commands and all options. The on-line reference pages are the complete reference for the commands. See Chapter 1 for a discussion on how to access the on-line help on UNIX, Macintosh, and Windows platforms. The companion website contains a Tcl/Tk reference guide that contains brief listings of all commands and all options.

If you prefer a more extensive tutorial, see the tutorials list on the companion website. You will find a copy of TclTutor, a computer-assisted instruction program that covers all of the commands in Tcl, and most of the command options.

Chapters 11 through 14 constitute the Tk tutorial. If you are performing graphics programming, you may be tempted to skip ahead to those chapters and just read about the GUIs. Don’t do it! Tcl is the glue that holds the graphic widgets together. Tk and the other Tcl extensions build on the Tcl foundation. If you glance ahead for the Tk tutorial, plan on coming back to fill in the gaps.

This book will print the command syntax using the font conventions used by the Tcl on-line manual and help pages. This convention is as follows.

commandname   – The command name appears first in this type font.
subcommandname   –  If the command supports subcommands, they will also be in this type font.
-option    -  Options appear in italics. The first character is a dash (-).
argument   - Arguments to a command appear in italics.
?-option?    – Options that are not required are bounded by question marks.
?argument?   -  Arguments that are not required are bounded by question marks.

The following is an example.
Syntax: puts ?-nonewline? ?channel? outputString

The command name is puts. The puts command will accept the options -nonewline and channel as arguments, and must include an outputString argument.

 

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Initiation of a study

UX research begins when either a stakeholder asks for it or a researcher suggests it. When a stakeholder asks you to conduct a study, it is a good sign. It’s good because the stakeholder realizes that answers to his or her questions begin forming with the people who will use the product or service. Having said that, I am sure you have received requests for studies that did not make sense to you. Here are several such requests I have gotten:

■ [Using usability testing as a sales pitch] Can you go to this prospective client and run a usability test with them? We want to show them we do this kind of stuff to make them want to buy from us.

■ [Integrating terminology from marketing research and usability] We need a usability testing focus group.

■ [Picking the wrong methodology to answer a legitimate research question] Can you ask a few of our users which features they use mostly?

Sometimes I get different requests, which I deeply appreciate:

■ Can you help us prioritize the features we are developing?

■ We want to prevent usability problems from happening. We have some sketches we drew on paper. Can we get user feedback on them?

■ We are going into a completely new market. Can you help us fi gure out what people in this market need and how they compare to markets we are already in?

Sometimes I don’t get any requests. Sometimes I am the one suggesting that a certain study should be done. I can do that because I constantly listen to my stakeholders. I don’t care if they don’t invite me to an important meeting once in a while. I proactively search for opportunities to make an impact with user experience research. On the road of converting my understanding that a study is needed into an actual study, I sow seeds by constantly looking around, identifying whom I should talk with, what to ask, and how to listen.

When there is a study request on the table, I immediately ask for a short meeting with the person who requested a study and additional relevant stakeholders and ask a series of very important questions.
 

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Introduction

 

Human beings have been part of social networks since our earliest days. We are born and live in a world of connections. People connect with others through social networks formed by kinship, language, trade, exchange, conflict, citation, and collaboration. Computer technologies used to create social networks are relatively new, but networks of social interactions and exchanges are primordial. Simply stated, a network is a collection of things and their relationships to one another. The “things” that are connected are called nodes, vertices, entities, and in some contexts people. The connections between the vertices are called edges, ties, and links. Many natural and artificial systems form networks, which exist in systems from the atomic level to the planetary level. Social networks are created whenever people interact, directly or indirectly, with other people, institutions, and artifacts. Social network theory and analysis is a relatively recent set of ideas and methods largely developed over the past 80 years. It builds on and uses concepts from the mathematics of graph theory, which has a longer history. Using network analysis, you can visualize complex sets of relationships as maps (i.e., graphs or sociograms) of connected symbols and calculate precise measures of the size, shape, and density of the network as a whole and the positions of each element within it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chapter 3: CULTURE AND UX

How many cross-cultural slips and gaps does that small anecdote hold? Attitudes toward time, expectations about appropriate activities, communication style, just to name a few. Aaron Marcus told us that story to illustrate the sort of cultural differences that cause heartaches, conflicts, and misunderstandings all the time. What is acceptable in one culture can be unthinkable in another.
We talk about “cross-cultural design” or “bridging cultures” – what does that mean for UX? User experience is based on understanding users. And users can now seem more diverse than ever. The UX challenges for this new, connected world are based on its biggest benefit: we are more connected.

This chapter looks at questions about culture and what it
means for UX:
• What do we need to know about cultures to do good UX?
• Are differences or similarities between cultures more important
for UX design?
• Are there models that will help us understand culture and
apply it in our UX work?
• How much does language matter in design and other UX work?

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