I have just come back from Digital Hollywood where I spent the whole of last week. Highlights included:

• Listening to Chuck D, founder of Public Enemy speak. I reckon he might be the best speaker on digital publishing that I have heard. Some highlights included:
• Don’t worry too much about contractual terms and other barriers to getting stuff out there. If you have a good idea its most important that you just get it out there. The deal will fall into place;
• When somebody compared UGC to McDonald’s and said that people prefer editorially selected content (fine restaurants where people were prepared to spend big money) to UGC (McDs), Mista Chuck pointed out that whilst nobody ever reheated a Big Mac, if you bite into a fresh one, it tastes really good (and so it is for UGC).
• What was most special was that Chuck D used 10 words when most people would have used 100 and he clearly had not just read a bunch of blogs and regurgitated the consensus. Maybe not surprising given that he has a track record of innovation in music. Afterwards I got the chance to trade a few stories with him from back in the day (him from Long Island, me from the Swansea Valley) as per the photo (apologies for picture quality but this was taken on a 59p hamburger of a camera phone);

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky
Is Mint trying to solve this problem or make it worse?

Sign Up Forms Must Die by Luke Wroblewski
We’ve been designing flows along these lines for a little while now. It is nice to see someone voice this approach.

Weplay.com is one of the biggest sites Mint has built. It includes a complex model of parent to child permissioning, a state-of-the-art UI, and a very robust security model to ensure the online safety of the children who make up the sites core demographic.

Press:
Social Site’s New Friends Are Athletes (New York Times)
Who Plays? Weplay (ABC News)

The last two days were demanding. On Thursday each team worked on the presentation of their idea.

Friday was pitching day. It ended on a high. The BBC commissioned Different and Mint to develop the “Doctor Who: In Parallel” idea.

In Parallel is a web and TV entertainment event. Fans collaborate to create their very own episode of Doctor Who. 3 exciting things about this are:

1. This is innovative. I’m positive it would be a headline-grabbing event.
2. In Parallel could replace the huge hole left in the schedule next year. Doctor Who is taking a break. This means Doctor Who doesn’t have to go away in 2009.
3. If we play our cards right, we might end up building a show agnostic platform for the BBC. This will allow the BBC to do similar things on other shows. Or even let the people create an entirely new show.

All 10 presentations were excellent and the ideas had come a really long way since the first day of the Labs. Jason DaPonte from the BBC said “I see a lot of ideas. I’ve been involved with the Labs for 3 years and see Content 360 ideas at MIP. This is the strongest set of ideas and presentations I’ve ever seen.”

Here are 3 ideas that really excited me.

1. Zeitgeist: David and Tom from Numiko
   Zeitgeist is drama series about an egalitarian new world order driven by mass online participation. It sounded as cool as something like Lost, Heroes or Skins. With mass participation at the heart of the story.
2. Blue Button Bookmarking: Simon and Nick from Rocket
   This idea assumes that ipTV is commonplace. You’ll be able to click the “blue” button to bookmark what you are watching. You can then simply watch the rest later or share it with others. Felt a bit like Last.fm for telly.
3. Inside-Out: Jim and David from Sumo
   Imagine you are at a festival. You wonder from one stage to another throughout the day. While you move through the festival your Facebook feed is getting updated with little messages saying something like “Tim has arrived at Glastonbury… Tim is listening to the White Stripes… Tim is at the beer tent… Tim is at the Pyramid Stage.” This might happen in the near future. Sumo have developed some technology that tracks a user’s real life location using Bluetooth in their mobiles.

Excellent work everybody.

Read what happened on days 1, 2 and 3 from the Labs.

Look at the photos from the pitching day.

Yet again, Carsonified put together a strong lineup of speakers covering a wide range of topics themed around where design on the web is currently heading. After the pre-conference party the night before we made a slightly slow start to the conference but soon got to hear some great talks.

My personal highlights included:

Steve Pearce & Andy Clarke’s discussion on User Experience vs Brand Experience. Steve’s view on creating a team with overlapping abilities and crossover of skills is something we particularly value at Mint.

Next up Andy Budd gave a fantastic talk on Designing the User Experience Curve. Taking influence from other more “human” industries we should strive to push for richer and more enjoyable user experiences. This is something we feel massively strongly about at Mint. The main points he covered were:

• First impressions - Creating a cohesive visual and usable website right from the word go is essential.
• Attentive service - Make sure a user’s needs are always looked after and out for.
• Personalisation - When we have any idea of who is using the site try to make them feel as at home as possible, allow customisation and flexibility here to encourage a richer user experience.
• Feedback and managing expectations - Andy gave an interesting statement about error handling, and how this is the perfect opportunity to turn a negative user experience into something positive and engaging.
• Make the whole experience fun.

During the afternoon we watched a live photoshop battle, heard interesting words from Larissa Meek, Elliot Jay Stocks, Paul Farnell, Jon Hicks (who gave an awesome presentation on his cheese site) before the day came to a close with Daniel Burka from Digg & Pownce. When I first came across Pownce i really fell in love with the strong and stylish yet functional visual language employed. Daniel raised some interesting points on his approach:

• Watch how people interact with a site and use whilst re-aligning or developing new features. We should be consider reducing features and streamlining the interface as much as we consider adding to it.
• High / Low road architecture. Pretty much every Mint site is required to be very quick to develop and easy to evolve so the concept of employing a more modular approach to design was particularly interesting.
• Use consistent visual language. Begin with an identity or related graphic style and work outwards from that point.
• Innovation should be used wisely. People are familiar with certain trends in web usability and we should strive to maintain usably whilst creating stimulating and engaging interfaces.

All in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable day. Well done to Jo at Carsonified for putting on such a strong event.

Here are some photos

We’ve just launched the Lonely Planet Desktop Countdown.

It’s a neat little app that counts down to your holiday. Every day it offers you a local tip and tells you the weather in the place that you are travelling to.

The app is part of the promotional campaign for the Lonely Planet Encounter city guides. Over the next few weeks, the Desktop Countdown will be promoted on coffee sleeves at 14 locations in London, banners on Yahoo! Weather and on London Underground posters. The total reach of the marketing campaign will be to over 3.6 million people. We snapped this poster at Vauxhall tube, round the corner from our office.

From a technology point of view it is pretty cool. It is the first time Mint has used Adobe AIR. AIR is Adobe’s platform for creating desktop apps. It brings the web closer to our desktop. It blurs the boundary between online and offline. In short, it opens up a bunch of new possibilities.

Have a read of 6 Adobe AIR Apps to check out to see what other uses people have been making of AIR.

I’m at the BBC Innovation Labs in Yorkshire this week.

The Labs are made up of 10 teams, 5 mentors and 1 Development Producer from BBC Research & Innovation. 5 BBC commissioners arrived today.

Each team consists of 2 people. Our team has 3 people in it. The teams works on the project they submitted for the Labs. We (Different & Mint) submitted against the Fiction & Entertainment Brief.

The mentors run a series of workshops. The workshops are designed to push the ideas to the limits. All the techniques are user-centered. This is a very important part of the development process at the BBC.

The teams work towards presenting an idea through a compelling and convincing story. The final presentation happens at the end of the week.

Here’s what we’ve done so far.

Monday AM:

• Frank Boyd from Unexpected Media made us play silly games to help break the ice. It worked. Some of the guys are now wondering the corridors in their robes!
• Discovered that the BBC prefer to be presented with a “Value Proposition”, rather than a “Pitch”.
• Found out that the Labs attempt to do 3 things. (1) Bring innovation in from the outside. (2) Build relationships with indies. (3) Enable indies to get together.

Monday PM:

• Discussed each idea using the Edward de Bono 6 Thinking Hats method. This really stretched our brains. It ripped the ideas to shreds and made us think about the idea from all angles.

Tuesday AM:

• Talked about about the importance of scenarios and how they help us understand how people will use a product or service.
• Went into detail about the 5 types of scenarios. (1) User lifecycle. (2) 90%, 9%, 1% usage. (3) User modes. (4) Before, during and after. (5) 1st, 2nd, nth use. (I’ll expand on these another time and write another post).

Tuesday PM:

• Created 2 personas. Personas are profiles of people who might actually use our product or service.
• Developed user scenarios based on the personas we created. These turned into user journeys.
• Sharpened up our idea and presented to the Mentors. It was now too sharp and felt too rational. We lightened up and made it more fun. Presented again and finally had something that seemed cool and valuable.

Wednesday AM:

• Spent the morning working on the presentation for our idea.

Wednesday PM:

• Presented our idea to the commissioner.
• Had an open conversation and found out what we needed to do to turn an idea into a commissionable piece of work.

Read about days 4 and 5 of the Labs

More details here.

Well, a few other Mints and I are just back from Scotland on Rails and what a good time we had! First, it’s always good to be back in the homeland. Second, it was a great conference.

What made it for me was the size. It was big enough to have decent talks but small enough to get to meet everyone you wanted. Out of the talks I saw, the JRuby talk on Saturday was particularly interesting. I’ve been meaning to give this more attention for a while and this has definitely reinforced the reasons for doing so.

Jonathan Weiss gave an interesting talk on Rails patterns which crossed over with our work at Mint. It’s great to see someone else talk about ideas we’ve been playing with internally. Image processing and asset storage are things we deal with in almost every project.

We also had a great post-conf meetup in London on Tuesday. I wasn’t aware at the time but it was actually a music and Ruby hacking meet. Writing Ruby to make music anyone? Combining two things you love is always good!

Anyway, a great conference all round and I’ll be back next year (if it’s on!). Well done guys. Check out the photos.

Added by Andy Bell: Two Mints were speaking at the conference. Paul Dix was speaking on collective intelligence. Thomas was speaking on high performance rails apps (slides soon). I added the photo too, in case anyone is wondering why Thomas is posting pictures of himself.

We’re obsessed with making great things, even the parts you don’t think about. We use modern techniques and web standards to build our sites, and that makes them more robust on new and old web browsers alike. On CSS Naked Day, you can see the results: our website stays usable and content-rich even when you strip away the styling. This is especially thoughtful for users with slow internet connections (the content loads right away, and the styling shows up later) and for visually impaired users who depend on audio screen readers, not shapes and colors.

Hundreds of forward-thinking web developers are joining in, and demonstrating that websites should work well at their most basic level—content. Among the Mints, Phil Nash’s blog and my personal site are also stripping down to promote web standards. Here’s to another year of pushing the web forward!