We don’t often write about products that we didn’t work on, but I came across Path last night and felt it was worth talking about. Path has been around since November of last year. I only vaguely remember looking at it when it first launched, and I don’t even recall what it did – obviously a problem.

The new version, Path 2, is about capturing and sharing moments – they refer to it as a smart journal. It’s not Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram or Facebook (though it does feel like the timeline). It’s a bit more like Evernote in terms of what it does, but is more about what’s going on in your life. What struck me about this app though, and made me want to write about it, was the interaction design.

Native vs Custom

Until recently, I’ve felt most apps fall into one of two camps. They either use core elements of an OS or they’re comprised primarily of custom UI. Neither one of these approaches is wrong, though some argue that breaking conventions is a no-no. I typically argue that it’s okay to diverge from conventions so long as the experience is intuitive and polished. If it improves things, even better. Experiences that start with an overlay teaching people how to use the interface obviously miss the mark. Thankfully, we’re beginning to see UI designers start to find some balance in between these approaches – Path is an excellent example. It feels familiar, but they’ve made some smart decisions that break away from the norm without wandering off into obtuse interactions or under/over-designed visuals. The decisions they’ve made not only make things better, they add personalty and delight – something that is crucial, and often overlooked when designing something functional. There are a number of things I love about the work the team at Path have done but I want to point out a few on iOS.

First impressions matter: first-run & on-boarding

Signing up for a service is typically a painful, or at least, mundane experience. It’s a few fields, some buttons and some useless directional copy. It works though. With the exception of a system error, no one struggles with these experiences. As designers, our tendency is to focus in on the meaty parts of a project and innovate. Something as trivial as a signup flow is considered a commodity and typically little to no effort goes into them. Path chose to improve it. The first-run simply lets you understand the value by looking at a canned ‘Path’. From there, you either create an account or use an existing one. No fields, no useless directional copy, just a few intuitive interactions. I love that form elements and actions are suppressed until I’ve chosen what I want to start with. This non-linear approach is refreshing. Once registered, the app also does a good job of connecting you with other people on Path (albeit without Twitter integration, though I’m told it’s coming soon). The number of screens below make make this appear like a long, drawn out process, but in reality you never notice it.

Best part about this: I don’t have to type in my email or phone number, just pick the appropriate info that’s pulled from my address book.

Navigation: Learned and explicit

There are two things that are noteworthy here. One is how you access the menu. There is an explicit button that slides the current view to the right revealing the menu below (the Facebook app does this too). Additionally, Friends are accessed through a button on the right. What’s nice about this is that there’s what I call UI hinting going here. By animating the panels left and right I’m given a hint that I can likely swipe them to execute the same action. Relying solely on swipe isn’t quite learnable enough, and obviously we don’t want a UI instruction sheet. But only using buttons isn’t the right choice either since a gesture requires far less accuracy and is therefor a more efficient means of performing the same action.

Best part about this: This isn’t a simple swipe then animate action. It’s a pan gesture. There is an enormous difference between these two methods. The former, makes things feel sluggish and disconnected, while the latter feels physical and natural.

Prioritization: Information when needed

One of the things that I love about small screen mobile design is that the physical size constraints force us to make hard decisions. What matters most in a given context is something that I’d love to see designers ask themselves more when working with larger displays. Striking a balance between what navigation and content I need to see at any given moment is what Path does right. The ‘post new’ button suppresses the options into a delightful radial fly-out menu – I’m not inundated with options by default. The best example though, is how they’ve prioritized the content. Because a Path is timeline-based, the common tendency for most designers would be to have a time stamp in some elegant, faint grey text – just visible enough, but not to loud as to cause a distraction. What Path decided to do, and I agree, is to focus on the content of the post and de-prioritize the timestamp by making it appear when you begin scrolling the timeline. This removes clutter from the screen but allows you to see the information when needed.

Best part about this: That Path realized the timestamp isn’t all that important by default. It is after all, a timeline, so you already understand some element of time without the stamp – i.e. the stuff at the top is recent.

Congratulations to the team at Path for re-inventing themselves. It’s an incredibly thoughtful interface and very interesting product – you should try it if you haven’t already.

Most of you likely know that Color is also reinventing themselves. I hope they read this and recognize that they too need a transformation like this. This is the level of care and polish that will become the standard for everyone – startups and established businesses.

You can follow me on on Twitter @gt and us @teehanlax.

Useful campaigns

Campaigns and apps that are inherently useful make a more impactful UX. Many campaigns have used augmented reality in their approach, but the World Lens app, is one of the most useful implementations that we’ve seen. The app for the iPhone and iPod Touch offers real time translation of text. You simply point your device’s video camera at a sign and the program translates and superimposes the translated text onto the video.

Another useful print ad for Carlsberg, gives a step-by-step process for turning the ad into an actual bottle opener. Although, you might have missed its intention when flipping through a magazine.

Retail marketing

Shopping retail is becoming an increasingly more immersive and interactive experience. Puma has recently implemented iPads for in-store use, and Adidas is using large LCD touch screens to help explore inventory and allow the user to build their own shoes and even checkout.

Kraft has been experimenting with facial recognition technology to hone in on targeted users. They put a kiosk in a grocery store that asked, “what’s for dinner?” The kiosk zooms in on the users face and instantly determines gender and age group to suggest products that might be appealing. It even goes one step further dispensing product samples like a vending machine. This type of marketing is great for point of purchase sales and is highly personalized. On the other hand, it’s possible the kiosk could identify the wrong gender or age altogether; hopefully, it won’t offend and mistake your Justin Bieber hairstyle for a little girl and suggest Teddy Grahams.

Social media

Many social media campaigns have encouraged themes of kindness and generosity, and have elements of planned spontaneity and tangible rewards.

A Dutch airline, KLM Airlines has used Foursquare as a platform and employed a ‘Surprise Team’ to give passengers personal, unexpected gifts at the airport. As soon as someone checked-in at a KLM Foursquare location, the Surprise Team went online to find out personal information about the person, and delivered a unique gift before they traveled. For instance, one traveler tweeted he would miss a PSV soccer game while he was in New York. The Surprise Team gave him a Lonely Planet guidebook of NYC with all the sports bars highlighted in blue.

Similarly, Interflora, a flower delivery service launched a campaign to brighten up the lives of Twitter users. They monitored Twitter looking for users that they believed need cheering up. Once found, the users were sent a bouquet of flowers. Privacy had to be a big concern during the course of these campaigns, since they are largely focused on social monitoring. Hopefully all of the recipients were pleasantly surprised and didn’t become paranoid that Big Brother is always watching.

Converging devices

The most significant trend that we see evolving in the future is the convergence of mobile devices, computers and TV screens. The key is to understand how devices will interact, and how to seamlessly integrate the entire experience from one screen to another.

Through the use of a banner ad, Gol Airlines has turned the mobile phone into a remote control. Users input their mobile number into the banner, and they immediately get a call connecting them to the desktop. The banner then becomes a flying game controlled by the mobile device. The ad comes together in the end, reminding customers that they can conveniently check-in via mobile phone when they fly.

The Shazam app is evolving, as the logo will be ‘embedded’ into programs ready for users to tag TV shows. This entails using a mobile device to listen and recognize the TV episode in question. Shazam will then provide complementary info; links to exclusive video and previews of upcoming episodes, access to playlists from the series and downloads. This will completely integrate the web browsing and TV watching experience.

Check out other notable ideas:

• E-paper
• Twitter, Secret Santa
• Heineken, The Entrance
• Yahoo, Multiplayer Gaming

It’s really nothing that new. Companies like FedEx have been connecting physical things to the web for years. Most of the examples are similar though – they involve scanning codes and updating systems to keep customers up-to-date. Another notable one is Domino’s pizza tracker. A system that lets the pizza makers scan barcodes at certain parts of the pizza making process to update their customers on the Web.

Recently we’re seeing an increase in activity here that goes beyond scanning codes, and it has me giddy with excitement to see where it goes. Poke’s Baker Tweet is a prime example of the physical Internet. Put simply, it’s a physical box located in the bakery that sends messages wirelessly to Twitter to let followers know what’s fresh. The guys who built it actually started a company called Breakfast who, from what I’m told, is all about creating experiences like this.

Another good example of this is Nike’s Chalkbot. A machine that took tweets and messages from real people and plotted them in chalk along a portion of the Tour de France.

I think we’re going to see some really innovative stuff this year, most of which will be connecting virtual stuff with real stuff. Last week, Andy Sandoz over at Work Club posted an interesting article that touched (sorry) on what it may be like if Facebook had a physical ‘Like’ button. I’d love to hear of more examples or thoughts on this.

This acts as a proxy for understanding the minimum level of resources and process it takes to do something. The larger the company, typically, the longer it will take them.

Lately, I’ve been using Joi Ito’s quote as an adjunct to my empty box test. He states:

“Want to increase innovation? Lower the cost of failure.”

This is the simplest and clearest articulation, I’ve read, on what large companies need to do to innovate.

When most companies realize that it takes them X weeks to ship an empty box, their reaction is “we must become more efficient”. What they need to do is lower the cost of failure.

Here are my thoughts after spending 24 hours with the Kindle.

Ordering

I bought the Kindle with accompanying leather cover. Total cost: $352.99

Order placed November 23. Order Arrived November 24.

Packaging

The Kindle arrives in a pretty simple brown package.

Kindle Packaging

At first I was underwhelmed but I really like the “Once Upon a Time” on the side.

side of kindle box

Here is an unboxing video….

The Amazon Kindle Arrives at Teehan+Lax from Greg Washington on Vimeo.

After opening the box this is what you see.

That text on the screen is not a sticker. That is the screen! It is incredibly sharp and crisp.

USB Kindle

You need to charge it fully by connecting the micro USB to the supplied power connector.

I’m not going to cover a full tour of the UI since these shots exist elsewhere online. But here are my initial thoughts.

* Purchasing content is easy. I bought a book on Amazon.com and it appears on the Kindle within 60 seconds. Buying content from the Kindle is as easy. Great experience!

* Reading is effortless and little to no eye strain. I read for about 2 hours last night and had no problems.

* When you hold the Kindle your fingers naturally rest on two buttons.

Kindle with Fingers on Nxt Page

My natural inclination is that pressing on the left button will go back and the right will go forward but that is not the case.

Kindle with Fingers off

It’s not a big deal but I miss hit it a few times.

* My biggest issue is something that I would never have thought of until I used the Kindle. When you read a book you make note of where you are spatially in the book. You are always aware of if you are 1/3 of the way through or 1/2 or near the end. The tactile feedback of weight in your left or right hand is an important cognitive clue, it also helps your brain position passages and narrative in a physical space. I can go to a book I read a year ago and know roughly where certain passages or parts are. “I know it was in the first half of the book”.

* With the Kindle I was aware that I would need to mark passages I may want to remember. There is a very robust notes and bookmarking feature in the Kindle. You can highlight passages, makes notes or simple bookmarks. The problem is to do this, you need to enter a menu, navigate a 5 way controller and then select the passage. It takes not only 10 or 15 seconds of time but more importantly you consciously need to stop reading and do this action. It is disruptive to the experience.

* The keyboard is ass. The buttons are really tough to type on. Maybe in the future I will type more notes and use it more, for now it’s just in the way.

* The Kindle arrives with your name and Amazon account programmed. This means there is zero setup when you turn it on.

* You get a Kindle.com email address. Sending PDFs to that address will add them to your Kindle.

I will try to cover more about the Kindle Store, newspaper and magazine reading in another post.

Huge congratulations go out to Teehan+Lax’s own Peter Nitsch and Greg Washington for taking home Best Canadian Developer and Best Canadian Designer at the recent FITC awards. We’re honoured and privileged to work with such a huge collection of talent – these guys included. Here’s the complete list of the ’09 FITC Award winners.

Ok, so it’s generally our policy not to blog about something that’s already gotten exposure on sites like Digg (let alone made it to the top ten), but for this one I’ll make a quick exception. Google just added an undo send button to its labs suite (or as TechCrunch calls it, a panic button).

This is the kind of “feature” enhancement I love. It’s a natural, yet subtle extension of how I use mail every day, it’s lightweight and unobtrusive, and it’s grounded in an aspect of human experience with email that’s so familiar and fundamental but ignored until now. The word I’d choose to describe this kind of feature is “humane”.

How many times have you sent out an email, just then noticing that you forgot to attach the file you were writing about in the first place? How many times have you forgot to copy someone, or realized you were addressing the wrong Steve, etc., etc. directly after hitting ‘Send’? For me it’s too many times to be a coincidence.

Often when we write emails—especially critical ones where pressure is involved—we get into a very focused, depth-first mode of reasoning. This makes it hard to see mistakes that would otherwise be obvious. My hypothesis is that as soon as we hit send, there’s this cathartic moment where pressure is relieved and we are suddenly able to reason more broadly, or in a breadth-first way. It’s only then that we notice the embarrassing mistakes we are now going to have to write a follow-up email to address. (There’s evidence to suggest this is the case, by the way, and I think it’d make for a great applied research topic.)

I’ve been waiting for a panic button in my mail app for a while now. Apple’s Mail got something like this (there’s a little cancel button next to the outgoing message progress bar in the Mail Activity), but I think it’s more for server-side issues and other technical stuff. I never have time to cancel my outgoing messages—there should be a 5-10 sec buffer between the time I hit send, and the time the message goes out, as in the new Gmail feature.

TripIt, a travel service that creates a single, readable online itinerary from your flight, hotel or rental confirmation is the first site I noticed doing this. To register, a user simply forwards a hotel, flight or rental confirmation email to plans@tripit.com. The site automatically registers you and replies with a confirmation and link to your new itinerary. Brilliant. (Note: TripIt also provides the classic registration form as well).

What’s important about this is that they’re reducing a psychological barrier to entry. Most people using Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail, etc. feel signing up for yet another online service is an annoyance. After a while, another registration form can feel like a burden. Email-based registration avoids this barrier by rolling registration and the way you interact with the service into one action. For example, the same way you use TripIt is the same way you sign up, by forwarding emails to plans@tripit.com.

Of course, form-less registration doesn’t fit for every solution. While flushing out the IA for ImageSpark, our home-brewed creative inspiration tool, we decided upon the classic email/password registration. The reason being that the core interaction with the site isn’t done through email but rather integrated browser and desktop upload tools; For ImageSpark, there was no gain in baking in an email-based registration. (Although we hope this won’t stop people from using it.)

A service like Posterous however, which uses email to create and update a blog, is built on avoiding forms at all costs. It makes sense than that your first email registers you and initiates your first blog post, all in one.

I’m pretty sure we’ll see form-less registration grow into a design pattern as new services emerge. And I’m looking forward to using it, so long as the situation is right.

Limited access to television, icy temperatures, and no amount of distance, held anyone back from watching Tuesday’s inauguration of the 44th president, Barack Obama. Several sites proudly played host to the most web-friendly presidential inauguration to date, spiking internet traffic levels to 54% above normal.

CNN streamed the live ceremony alongside an impressive Facebook tool, which let users update their status, and toggle between viewing live status updates of their own friends, or the general public (consisting purely of Obamania). You could call it a success, an average of 4,000 users updated their status every minute, and CNN reported over 1.5 million status updates through their portal alone.

Meanwhile, not one minute was wasted updating the White House website, literally. By 12:01, the site was Obamafied, and the blog page already flourishing with updates and recaps.

At the Obama-friendly T+L, we were lucky enough to get a mid-morning break to pile into the boardroom and watch history unfold. It was especially exciting for us that the ceremony that captivated millions of people around the world had a much higher priority online, compared to in the past.

We even had some friends from the Globe and Mail join us for a story.

Just released LinkedIn Applications… so good to link my Slideshare and our Blog right into LinkedIn. This should have happened months ago. I would like to connect my Twitter to it…

I am reasserting my Valentine’s Day post that RIM should buy LinkedIn.